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>"Office runs into tens of millions of lines of code." I am aware of that - my father doesn't give a shit. He wants "to download Office"

Unquestioningly bend to the capricious whims and desires of non-technical users, a winning strategy for any tech business.

Last month a user told me I should add full-fledged accounting and payroll management to my niche software so he doesn't have to buy QuickBooks. Better get cracking!

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Obviously I do not believe that you should listen to all user requests, in fact I think that most can be ignored. However, I do not think my dad is unlike a lot of our dads/cousins/in-laws/familynontechie. I truly believe that a majority of non technical people would by "Office™ for X" simply because of the first word, and /that/ is when you start to listen to your customers.

Microsoft is not a niche software company. They dump billions down holes every year for completely fruitless projects. They could have easily bought dataviz, called documents to go Office Mobile, and called it a day.

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