Office 97 and Windows XP was something of a high point in personal computing. The internet has enabled entirely new product categories, but it has also badly eroded old ones with the solvent of MRR greed. Merely selling a thing just ain't good enough, especially if it's software. Even offline applications are SaaS, now, where the "service" are frequent updates that leave you at the perennial mercy of every company from which you purchase software (and every company with which they do business, recursively). I'm normally pretty sanguine about business models, but when I lay it out like this, I find it quite disturbing.

So I won't think about it.

2 years ago I decided to fire up my Pentium#100 and write a technical plan on it using Office 2000, for my real life corporate job. It worked magnificently, no fuss, plan presentation went fine. Faster on a 100mhz machine with 16MB ram than whatever monstrosity underlies O365 and Google Docs.

I'll happily use an old Office, just please splice in the "What do you want to do?" search bar so I don't have to hunt through nested menus/ribbons for some obscure formatting option I use once every 6 months.

Not really.

Office suites were a mistake. Return to text editor.

Office 2003 was probably the peak, and then it started going downhill with 2007.

you can still ban internet access in firewall and activate it locally, I'm using last offline installable Office 2019, 365 can't touch my computer

I just want a simple version of MS Access in the cloud.