Comment by MrOwnPut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrOwnPut | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The MS monopoly is preventing progress in many fields.

I fail to see this. Could you provide examples and reasonings?

At least in the developer community they've provided many tools that facilitate a lot of progress.

- TypeScript (huge boost for the JS community)

- VSCode (massive contribution for all developers)

- Monaco (allows any website/app to provide a quality code editor)

- LSP (allows other code editors to compete with VSCode)

- Playwright (got rid of the puppeteer Chrome-only browser testing lock-in)

- WSL (I mean... Linux support, nuff said.)

- RNW (boosts react native, helping break down the app walled garden development, no need for Swift/Kotlin/whatever)

I'm sure there's a lot more I missed.

Word Processors for one, and possibly the whole Office suite.

There have been no significant updates to sore points in Word such as: bullets and numbering that are convoluted to create and can completely corrupt; VBA IDE is probably unchanged since the 90s and the language itself has had little to no improvements.

Office 365 has only made things worse: collaboration features will randomly drop your formatting; auto-save can disable itself in some conditions; even with auto-save on, there can be significant lag between collaborators.

PowerPoint, years ago, lost the ability to record macros... it's still missing even though you can write macros and run them.

Don't even get me started on how much of a joke their "OpenXML" format is.

There's been so much potential in the Office suite that's been squandered by MS focusing on adding half baked features rather than making a truly solid product.

WSL was essential to keeping people using Windows which they then use to railroad you with dark patterns into using their Cloud services and browser. On first install and every significant update they make it very difficult to not use their cloud services. With Edge they don't let you turn off the spammy trashy ads on the new tab page unless you're a pro user or corporation or something.

Anything MS does that seems nice like TypeScript, C#, VSCode etc is the exception not the rule.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com