The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster
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I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Yeah, we have networked supercomputers in every pocket and on every desk. And word processors and spreadsheets have been around for decades---that use case is a solved problem.
I suppose we can be charitable to Microsoft and say they're trying to innovate, but these AI features lack a clear practical need that they're meeting. It feels more like Big Tech flopping around trying to make the next big thing happen, rather than actually going out into the real world and solving problems actual humans have.
I'm glad my web-only 365 (business basic without teams, can't use the family plan because I need a personal domain) just renewed for a year so they can't mess with mine.
But if, as the GP says, you want a program to “just let you write” (with some "writing-phase" accoutrements like change-tracking, word count, a dynamic Table of Contents, and so forth) — and you want a pleasant experience while writing, that takes advantage of the acceleration of native OS UI elements to keep that writing as smooth and jank-free as possible... then I’d assume Pages would be the clear winner, no?
(That, or just TextEdit. Though I’m not sure if TextEdit is optimized for novel-length texts the way word processors would tend to be.)
But Pages is much more ergonomic, lightweight, and native on a Mac. There’s not a likely scenario where I’d use LibreOffice over Pages.
It is ironic, that libreoffice solves this the best, by being truly cross platform and not requiring special software to be purchased on the receiving end: yet it is the momentum of Microsoft Word that would instead hamper adoption of other word processors.
I am thinking about this, because the reason I would choose not to use Pages, is so that I can share my documents to other companies or even people in my company who may not have a Mac.
* Install UX (how difficult, what pop-ups).
* First time user experience.
* Launch speed.
* Consistency with OS (such as using native file dialogs, hotkeys).
* Export Options (perhaps compatibility too).
* Spellchecker (especially if the OS is configured in another language than US english and the processor can detect it).
* Input latency.
I wonder if there would be more, though of this list I think LibreOffice would do very fairly compared to Pages.app and MS Word for Mac.
Disingenuous? More like realistic.
I mean this ultimately boils down to “is inconsistent with the design of the rest of the computing experience.” People who care about good, consistent design and can afford to pay for it are Apple’s core market.
It's the story of open-source on Mac. Projects will have an anemic userbase. After all, most Mac users wouldn't be caught dead with Temu MS Word. This means the apps have very poor performance on Mac. No one is filling bug reports.
"We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices."
I am using Word on my Mac (version 16.93) and do have a checkbox that disables Copilot.
I was very excited about that feature announcement --- until I realized it was just sending the code to MSFT to parse or whatever.
"Excel understands Python now" would be amazing. What they actually did is completely pointless.
TextEdit all the way.
I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I don’t need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign. I don’t need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.
https://gizmodo.com/sci-fi-writer-releases-free-archive-of-l...
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor
Edit: I once used WordStar 4 with a daisywheel printer.
The latter really doesn't follow from the former. All? Sounds like you need basic printing..
“I don’t need a spellchecker because I can spell.”
“I don’t need a calculator because I can do math.”
They should put it in the bottom corner, next to an animated paperclip instead.
Now that would be kinda funny, Clippy powered by modern AI
I should probably give it another whirl, although I'm really happy with 2003.
So the friction is still there, but it's a lot less now.
But pretty sure it's not worse than Microsoft. I'd rather burn my money than spending it on Microsoft "products".
As for instructions/support: Changes between subsequent versions are minor. There was a versioning scheme change recently, so you may be thinking "Oh, LibreOffice 7.3 vs 24.8, very different" - no, mostly the same thing, it's just that 24.8 came out in 2024, in August. Also, there is ask.libreoffice.org #libreoffice on irc.libera.chat , and there are Telegram and Matrix channels... so just ask.
But it's true that with 0.1%-0.5% or so of the budget MS Office gets, it's difficult to keep all of the materials fully up-to-date.
I think LibreOffice 2024 is much better than Office 2003.
Slightly surprised it still works on Windows 11. I'd be surprised if it had 64-bit support. I guess thst speaks to their commitment to backwards compatibility.
Who is writing these super long emails?
That being said, I'd almost never trust an AI to generate the summary part.
Like a reverse compression.
Other LLMs.
The future you described is a wild kind of dystopia.
Obviously (dark) joking.
Because someone had 'Achieve Copilot feature adoption and utilization > 80%' on their VP level OKRs?
To this day Excel still does not have ribbon shortcuts so for any excel pros, it’s garbage. I have to run excel in a windows emulated environment.
I don’t know by what mechanism, so it may only be possible with an enterprise license or through device management. But I know it’s possible because I’m on the email thread where someone sought guidance from management and the directive was affirmed to block it on Macs in our fleet.
> In your app (for example, Word), select the app menu, and then go to Preferences > Authoring and Proofing Tools > Copilot > Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox > Close and restart the app.
> If you do not see the related button, it means this button has not been pushed to your Office version yet. Please be patient and wait for the development team to release an update.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-d...
Not: "Please wait for ... an update" But: "Please be patient and wait for ... an update"
It's not just their staff here, it's all over the docs and UI too. They can't write two sentences without saying something condescending and rude.
Like in Word, if you look for how to turn off grammar checking, they'll tell you, but they just have to add "Remember to run spell check. Spelling and grammar errors can seriously undermine what you're trying to say, especially when your boss, your teacher, or that person in HR sees them." [1]
They can't help themselves.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/turn-spell-check-...
I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" so it doesn't surprise me that 365 went the same way.
I'm saying this and I'm a person that's usually extremely enthusiastic about new tech, but I'm just burnt out on these companies trying to shove AI down our throats.
Had it been opt-in and gradual, I would be far more optimistic and enthusiastic. I guess my question is "why such a rush?". Even Apple rushed into it with something half-baked and unfinished.
First mover / Fear of missing out.
Frankly, inclusion of "AI" in a tool is a great way to ensure I don't use it.
OpenAI alone spent $20G plus some unknown value to make the first version of it we have now. They and all the others need to justify the investment.
My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".
Are you using it for your old macs?
Of course, it’s not perfect but what is.
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases...
“As to be expected, macOS Sequoia support is still in active development. This is a community-driven project, and as such we ask users to keep expectations in check and use older OSes if you encounter issues that affect you.”
Luckily I'm not the only one and there are many tools to pretty much keep Windows stuck in time.
> M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.
No, it's because "M$" doesn't think it's an important feature. There's no incompetence. Do you actually believe what you said?
Is this some form of OCD or hypersensitivity? Because I struggle to understand the type of mind that cares at all about this. And how do such people go through life, especially working in software, where things change constantly?
Would you also defend any of the above?
Also, this has been a feature since the XP days, people have built muscle memories around it, and then for literally no reason M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them and restore this basic functionality that has been there forever.
> There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use
And this is a good thing to you somehow? I don't want my OS switching up on me at random every day of the week, I want to login the next day and have everything be where I last placed it, not have some troglodyte PM at M$ trying to suckle on the promotional teet decide where my icons go for me.
> "M$"
Are you perhaps one of the aforementioned troglodyte PMs over there? I've noticed that M$ employees get pretty bothered about that little dollar sign in the name.
Perhaps the problem is a deeper one, which is constant and likely unnecessary UI makeovers. But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto:
> Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day?
All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
> M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them
But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
For me it's personally not, it's mostly about how slow and bloated W11 feels. On my 9800X3D (an insanely powerful and fast chip!), explorer is slower than it was in the windows 95 days on the i386 of yore. They've converted half of everything in Windows into a web view and you can feel it, don't even get me started on the adware.
> All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, to me the taskbar is one of the most central parts of a modern OS next to file navigation and things like the start menu. It sits on your screen, visibly and permanently, and takes up a good chunk of your screen real estate. I know for many people they prefer it vertical because otherwise they have a kilometer-wide, mostly-empty taskbar taking up ~5-10% of the bottom of their screen. For me I keep it on the top of the screen because A) It's what I'm used to since the XP days and B) I find it easier to reach for than on the bottom, because my cursor is pretty much always on the top half of the screen rather than the bottom half.
> But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
You could make this same argument for basically every feature though, including the ones I listed. Why not remove background images and let it be handled by some 3rd party tool as well? It's about as basic as customization can get in an OS, so it should be handled natively by the OS. Not to mention that, due to it being 3rd party, it's also prone to breaking on Windows updates, and some applications rely on the OS to handle things like where to place the application window, and having things hack around OS-imposed limits like this does lead to weird behaviors and bugs.
It shouldn't require someone download 3rd party tools for functionality this basic, especially since it's already been in there since the basically the inception of the OS. Even MacOS lets you do the vertical taskbar/Dock, and that's the epitome of closed-down customization (not that Apple doesn't have similar problems, such as requiring 3rd party tools for external mice or window tiling via Rectangle).
Everyone has their own personal last straw.
Really the pettiness of spending effort to remove a feature for no good reason is the annoying thing here.
1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]".
2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits.
3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools.
4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges.
5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space.
6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore.
It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem).
Not only that, but the users who did move the taskbar are more likely to be the "power users" who will help to evangelize Windows in an organization. Those are users who Microsoft should want to keep happy. When you lose them, you lose any sort of grassroots support in an org.
It's a small change in terms of code and number of users affected. It's a big change to the affected users and in user perceptions.
It was in Windows 95! AT LAUNCH!
[ExplorerPatcher]: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
Mild example: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040513-00/?p=39...
I think this part depends on the person. I've personally been programming since I was a kid making games for my TI-83+, and in all that time and fatigue have been the limiting factors in how much of what I wanted to build that I actually could build.
So something able to write code rigorously enough to replace SWEs would be an absolute dream! I love programming with all my heart, and it's the thing I've spent most of my life doing... but I feel in love with it because it could make things.
A way to make even more things at a greater scale I'm individually capable off is such a joyous idea that if anything, I get annoyed at the idea they'd tease that without knowing it's possible (of course, they're trying to raise so...)
The aspect of wanting to replace SWEs is completely ok with me and I think there should be a rush to see it through. Imagine if every researcher could have an army of top tier SWEs at their beck and call for example. Or even imagine learning to program alongside a personal world-class expert from day 1, after all the fact AI could do it wouldn't mean we couldn't still do it ourselves if we wanted to.
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Unlike the "AGI in 3 years crowd" I don't actually know that it's possible, but where I agree with them is that the route there is probably not going to be a slow burn. Most companies need to demonstrate some external value along the way or they won't be able to continue, hence the chasing down of usecases that they can ship today.
Unfortunately not all of us can raise $1B on a txt file and a promise not to release our product :)
So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.
After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.
(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)
Concentration of wealth.
GenAI consumes content, even that created in low resource languages and regions, and spits it back out, separating the creator from the traffic due to their labor.
This isn’t entirely unknown - we’ve all been inspired by someone else stuff and copied our own.
Now, genAi firms have inserted themselves into this loop. And they’re cutting out the creator.
The scaled, automated pseudo workers that these firms promise, are owned by the firms. The productivity they create accrues to a small group of foreign multi nationals.
Economically - this shouldn’t be an issue. More productivity, means more capability of people doing newer work.
I do expect this to happen. However firms are also very good at making sure they capture the greater share of the market.
Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work, possibly for good, nor are we in any way ready for the kind of power certain tech billionaires would have if their workforce were to scale with just the amount of hardware they own.
At this point I kind of hope the current breed of AIs will plateau quickly and stay there for a while so that maybe society can catch up instead of getting surprise bulldozed by a gaggle of tech giants.
likely followed by either a French Revolution (if lucky) or a Russian Revolution (if not)
It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though. Who’s gonna buy their crap and for what reason will they they create anything? The whole thing seems like a massive doom spiral.
Thanks for this, but Solarians have an economy that sells robots to other planets. Earth has no such luxury.
You have machines that can design and build mega-yachts, mansions, private space craft, ....
You can afford to purchase vast areas of land from people selling whatever they have to get by, ...
--
Asking what billionaires will do when they can't sell to the poor, is like asking why the human economy didn't crash ages ago because we have any off planet aliens to sell to.
Or how did we keep the economy going all this time, given the ants and trees couldn't afford anything we produce?
All an economy needs is someone with the means of production, who is able to get resources, and use those resources to produce something they want. I.e. you can have a working economy with just a single person. Or self-interested AI.
Hermits have an economy. Now imagine the hermit has trillions of dollars of resources and square miles of intelligent circuitry and robotic servants.
That hermit doesn't need the rest of us. Customers? Where we are going, we don't need customers.
Our societies were built before there was a technology that could replace its smartest people with machines that never tire?
I don't get why people keep trying to imagine current society + super-intelligent AI: by definition it won't be our current society if we can actually get there would it?
I mean if we have AI that can even replace the researchers (I wouldn't dream so boldly tbh), imagine how much faster the pace of scientific discovery becomes. Imagine how much more efficient we can make power generation and transmission, discover new treatments for disease, democratize learning at costs never before possible...
I don't love to spend too much time daydreaming what we could do down that because SWEs already feels like a bit of a pipedream, so all novel research being automated away is just completely in fantasy land... but realistically we're already on a pretty terrible trajectory otherwise.
Our next billion people are about to be born into some of the worst off parts of the planet. AI becoming good enough to replace researchers would be an infinitely more positive trajectory than some of the others we could end up on on otherwise.
I think a lot of the unchecked pessimism around super-intelligent AI is just people being a bit naive or shut off from the reality of just how terrible things are going to be over the next century.
We're waging 25% tariffs over planefuls of people, what's going to happen when it's 100 million people trampling over borders trying to escape disease, famine, and temperatures incompatible with human life?
Compared to that, even if these companies abuse their ownership of AI and monopolize the gains, an AI capable of producing novel research and development by itself would still bring us much closer to solving major problems than otherwise.
Though I think you misunderstand or underestimate human nature of self interest. Everyone that is in control of a superpower like this will abuse it. Be it on a presidential level, be it on CEO level, be it a major shareholder of a foreign NGO. That is why we had democratic splits of types of power in the first place. I say "had" because the trend globally is leading to right wing autocratic ideas due to manipulation of social media.
Human self interest and egocentric world views is what gave us this mess.
The only thing capable of evening out the odds is a federalistic decentralized approach, which we desperately need for AI. Something like a legislative system for lots of overfitted mini AI assistants that also give outliers a chance to be the social trend.
Otherwise we will land up with the ministry of truth, which, right now is Facebook and TikTok effectively. The younger generations that grew up with social media tend heavily towards populist right wing ideas because those are easily marketable in 30 seconds. Paint the bad guy, say that it is established fact, next video. Nobody is interested in the rationale behind it, let alone finding and discussing a compromise like you would in a real debate that wants to find a solution.
We need to find a way to change beliefs through rationale rather than emotions. Ironically this problem is also reflected in trained LLMs that turn into circlejerks because they've learned that from the dataset of us easily manipulateable humans.
So instead of being used to improve quality of life, AI gets used to improve efficiency of death.
There's about to be 500 billion dollars invested in generating even more electricity for these monstrosities, instead of literally anything else actually useful today that we could be putting towards climate research or renewable energy. Nope, we're just gonna generate even more spam and bullshit while spinning up nuclear reactors to power it all.
People tend to take different pieces of mutually exclusive end states. Like my comment is speaking to a fantasy like outcome where again, we have AI that puts all researchers out of jobs.
If it can do that (which I don't think it will, but if we're dreaming it), let it boil oceans, let them abuse it, you can become unfathomably wealthy by solving world hunger.
Let them force countries to take out loans that practically put then in OpenAI's permanent debt to access the advancements they come up with.
It's still better than the alternative, and it still allows room for them to be as evil as they want.
I mean either way countries are going to become indebted to companies eventually if we keep down the current path. I don't see how the ultra wealthy can't use mass upheaval and desperation to secure extremely cheap labor and solidfy their power even without AI.
At least now, even if it's for their own personal gain and amusement, they can trivially solve
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It's like we're talking about someone potentially developing a cure for all cancer, but everyone is worried because the company behind it is evil and will hoard it for themselves while charging $1B per dose: let's still get to that cure if it can be developed.
It'll be a truly miserable and awful world watching people we know die while there's a cure, and watching them die because they're not able to pay this villain... but today there's no cure, no proof one can exist, no hints on how to get one.
It's better to have the cure and no clue how to fix the broken situation that it creates, than to have no cure and no clue how to fix cancer, because one is a problem of people/power/ethics and the other is a problem of unknown proportions and guaranteed ongoing suffering not more damaging than having a cure, no matter how inequitable access to it is.
For another, research isn't an end unto itself. As you note, for some people an already-unfathomable level of societal knowledge has resulted in nothing but continued poverty. Benefit from scientific knowledge requires a stable economy full of consumers who can and will purchase high-tech items. Where will that wealth come from once the value of human intellectual labor has been so undercut by cheap AI intellectual labor? Without the capitol to make AIs work for us, most if not many people will be left to live their life as servants to AIs so that those AIs are able to have autonomy in the real world.
The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.
Sorry, but that’s not true at all. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Who is replacing the CEO of a company with AI? The board? The board doesn’t want/can’t run the company. They will hire someone to “run the CEO AI”? Won’t that just be a CEO using AI? Maybe that makes it so the CEO is paid less Because now they just run OpenCEOv4? I don’t see it happening though. Also a very large portion of the day to day of CEO level execs at those big companies interpersonal and/or performative. You won’t be replacing that with AI anytime soon. You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Wasn't that the whole point of AI generated images / video?
Throwing away all the humans to replace them with AIs is a move only an AI CEO would make, because and AI couldn't give less of a shit if something it does blows up in its face. Well, apparently real CEOs couldn't care less either. Imagining you're going to run a successful software organization (once you've hollowed out the people who both understand the work and actually give a shit about it) is insane. These people know that it will blow up, but they hope that it is only after they can rake in their bonus pay for the mounds of short term profits that result form layoffs, after which they'll float away under their golden parachutes leaving their former companies to collapse under the weight of institutionalized incompetence.
They'll have to live in bunkers for the rest of their lives.
Imagine that you're one of them, and you want to go watch a game (or a T. Swift concert) -- so you hop on your private jet and go to the stadium/arena. If you happen to be caught on-camera and your face is up there, on the Jumbotron, every single person there is gonna boo you. That's what your life will be like. What's the point?
Some healthcare ones did for a few weeks, after one of them got whacked by someone truly over their bullshit.
> You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Feel like that one's solved with 30 seconds on DALL-E
The AI will get blamed and they can switch from OpenAI to Claude to something else.
How the F do you square that circle? If you're at the top you either are responsible or you aren't.
I have a grandfather that actually took an early retirement package, age 55, specifically because company gave him an ultimatum regarding switching from typewriter to a PC in the 80s. I feel like AI is pushing me towards making that same choice, I don't really care for using it in my work specifically (have no ultimatum at present).
I use it sparsely and it's more of a toy/novelty to me. Although, I do see how it helps other fields more/less and could replace humans in some professions - I'm not a SWE.
We still have no AIs developing anything, they aren't even sensibly integrated in workflows where only written texts need to be parsed and processed.
Earlier this month I received a price increase email from Microsoft for Office 365 - to the tune of a 46% increase.
Not too keen on this I went to their website to check to see if there was a cheaper plan, and it turns out there is. You can "downgrade" to a Copilot-free version of Office 365, and this also does away with that absurd 46% increase.
So you get to remove Copilot -and- dodge another year of price increases.
Mini edit: Microsoft have started rolling out a "Turn off Copilot" options in the settings, I have it now in Word, but not in Powerpoint or Excel.
Sadly, switching is the only form of protest we can do against such actions.
and it doesn't work.
No explanation. I pay for this Office shit (won't anymore now obviously). AI is ruining everything either directly or indirectly. Congrats.
Why don't you install and use one of the last single purchase licensed version? Last time I checked they were still available.
What have I done to banish it?
(I'm with you. I actually don't mind Word and Excel, on either platform, because they're good. Excel is pretty great, tbh. But the ongoing goofiness of MSFT is definitely making me look at alternatives more than i used to.)
*EDIT* It appears my refusal to allow AutoUpdate to run at will has saved me? I'm on Word for Mac 16.8.
I tried it once to make a lost cat poster and ended up just using Krita.
I loathe using that app.
In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.
We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.
But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.
That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.
And it's been like that at at least 3 or 4 companies I've worked at so it's not just this specific organisation.
It’s been broken for some time, mate. The era of subscription based models blurred it long ago.
I only assume you refer to the pre 2000 state of Office. Confusion started way befor AI.
And to me the OneDrive - was forced on my in the job - was never a properly usable product, allowing others think differently, but to me, its weird ways and failures (i.e. renaming files) are jus barriers to efficiency.
I understand OneDrive as Microsoft’s version of Dropbox, but the more it’s integrated into Windows/Office, the more confusion it causes me.
I had uninstalled OneDrive the first time I used this laptop. But that wasn't enough. I had to reinstall OneDrive. Turn off folder backups. Unlink the PC from OneDrive. Then uninstall it again. That fixed the two Documents folders problem. OneDrive\Documents went away and the contents put back into Users\username\Documents.
A fairly frustrating experience and wasted about an hour troubleshooting it.
I have always been puzzled by the threads since it’s a mess with a bad UI with bad default locations for the various programs.
this was one of my favorite uses as well, especially when copying something from Word. copying to Notepad before copying to a terminal has saved me from so much grief of debugging why something is acting other than expected
This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
But even I can't reliably name the last two generations of Xbox without a pause. I always have to stop for a second and think it thru because the naming scheme is so abysmal.
The XBOX COPILOT, the new handheld PC powered by AI!
Xbox isn't just a single physical hardware device. Its a platform for playing games.
I do agree though, the naming patterns for their consoles has been absolutely atrocious. I consider myself somewhat of a gamer but if you just gave me the list of consoles there's absolutely a non-zero chance I'd fail at picking the rankings of performance and age.
let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead
certainly a courageous decision
My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't.
30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more important. The fact that no one stopped this or that shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how absolutely broken modern computing is.
Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.
As an IT person I can guarantee this rebranding is going to cause confusion that will waste my time.
That being said, Coke killed Coke Zero and seems to be doing okay I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The common denominator is ego. Office may be a globally recognized brand, but it was defined by someone else, and the person making the decision needs to mark their territory.
They destroyed the entire Xbox brand overnight and hampered any chance at recovery with a stupid confusing naming scheme... now it seems like they've learned nothing from that?
> 12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation
But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!
Seriously, I have an xbox one and couldn't tell you which model it is, even after looking at pictures of them. I know there is a newer better model out now that looks similar and has a similar name. If I wanted to spend the $600 or whatever to upgrade tomorrow, I wouldn't know which one to buy.
Are you calling it office when you are starting up Teams, powerBI or Microsoft Stream? I don't.
I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.
Nothing will change until there's actual skin in the game for leadership. Leadership screws up and at worst they get some 7 figure exit package and still have no issues finding a job.
Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus.
Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance.
Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.
Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting a long time ago.
Teams has popup ads inside the app itself. No, I don't give a bloody damn about whatever stupid new feature you're trying to force upon me when I'm in the middle of a deep conversation with a coworker.
PS. Nobody I know uses Excel's Turing-complete Lambda-calculus. None of my former colleagues in Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Investor Relations, FP&A use it.
So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft right now.
You sure that wasn’t an operator error? Sounds like a pretty basic feature to not have working.
- Steve Jobs. 1996
I guess some things never truly change. And thst kind of" culture" is how you amass a cult following (it's in the word, "cult" ure).
Outside of early Xbox I can't think of many counterexamples to this.
That being said, I agree that the company and the brand evoke nothing but negative emotions in me, and I don't know anyone that would have anything better than "meh" on them.
I will admit Jobs put "style" and "finish" on things that MS never does.
apple is also getting watered down. I don't think they've really come out with anything truly novel after sj passed away. In comparison to the ipod or iphone or ipad, the apple watch, vision, apple pay don't seem groundbreaking.
> no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing
Based on their increasingly user-hostile decisions up to this point (re: tricking people into using edge, ads in the start menu, etc) it's pretty clear that the name of the game is to monetize their privileged position as OS vendor by selling their users out to the highest bidder.
I expect they want TPMs everywhere so that they can abuse the passkey protocol's "attestation statement" to include attestations to advertisers about the user themselves, rather than about the auth circumstances (which is what that field is for). Being able to expose details about the human on the other side of an otherwise anonymous browser session is big money for advertisers, and if everybody has a TPM Microsoft can cryptographically exclude competitors from that channel (they no longer have to care if you're using chrome instead of edge). As for the AI everywhere, that's how they'll get to know you so that there's something to sell.
They've got a lot of thought going into their product, it's just that none of that thought is for the benefit of their users. Which is why I heartily disagree with:
> I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft
But in the (small?) corner of developer products they've been pretty good: Typescript, VSCode, .NET/C#/F#, LSP, Lean are all great and very influential contributions.
If you don't hate microsoft after a few months of working remotely using Teams, Outlook etc, I'll be pretty impressed
I use a bunch of their products, but I have a strong negative emotion towards them.
> For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, Copilot will be available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/1...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Heh. Things like that drive my wife absolutely crazy. I get to tease her about Microsoft wanting my OK if she tries to do something out of bounds.
What an absurd mess.
idk ariane 5 crashed because of an int overflow
--==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==--
because:
1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans.
2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac.
3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to tell anyone about you or share a copy of your private documents.
4. No logging into anything or managing licenses.
5. You can download and use it for free: www.libreoffice.org (and it's on Chocolatey and WinGet too I think, if you're in Windows-land) . But of course it helps a lot when people also donate.
7. It has good community support; and there are also options for paid support, training, transition and deployment if you're in a business or organization.
8. There are also written guides in several languages for those who like that format, and there are some video tutorials etc.
and finally:
9. It is managed by a democratically-run public foundation with members from across the world. There are no large companies or governments pulling the strings or calling the shots.
If you mean the fact that it's not ribbony, with a lot of unused empty space between widgets and with mobile-phone-like aesthetic - the rejection of that style is intentional. Microsoft went that way, and hurt usability; LibreOffice has not. Although some argue emphatically that it's the way to go in order to attract new users.
For those who like a more ribbon'y UI style - it's available as an option. On the menu, choose "View > User Interface..." TBH, that's not fully-developed and I don't like it much.
One other aspect of modernization is that there is a dark mode, which has improved a lot over the past couple of years: https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-dark-mode/
but if you have specific suggestions/rants - UI/UX discussions are always ongoing, albeit slowly given the immense size of the project and the amount of dialogs and UI/UX aspects to be considered and improved. Try the "LibreOffice Design" channel on Telegram for example.
So, I expand "Apps", and I see an item named "Microsoft CoPilot 365". It absolutely did not occur to me that this was a rebranded/updated Office. I simply thought "Aww, man, Microsoft is at it again, raining some new crap on me that I never asked for." Without a moment's thought I right-clicked it and uninstalled. Only now as I read this thread I realize I may have accidentally uinstalled MS Office.
Teams is now named “Teams (work and school)”
Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on pretending otherwise for a few years.
Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically better at writing more essays. It’s supposed to train your ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound reasoning.
The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever).
I'm
(Yes Thank You) (Remind Me Later)
Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.
People who whine about writing being difficult or unimportant are going to be deficient in both.
That assumes Microsoft allowing you to do so.
I got really good at getting my thoughts down quickly and efficiently. My freshman English course in college nearly broke me however since we were required to revise our papers at least twice after getting feedback, even if the feedback as overwhelmingly positive. It was a skill I had never developed.
Honestly the most impactful writings I ever had to write in my education were required to fit within a standard bluebook.
When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible.
If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway (if you're required to do something with it short summary, you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing way before the "AI" hype).
Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:
- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet
- read the summary
- write your paper
It would still take you hours.
Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.
You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.
> If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway
This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.
You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.
> Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
You're underselling how much easier the access is.
> If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.
A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.
Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
I must apologize, because my parent comment wasn't well thought out.
Rather than saying "wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place" (which wasn't logical, sadly, I got carried on an emotion) I should've said that it has a limit to its usefulness. It probably was a meaningful system back in the day, just not future-proof. So it eroded over time and isn't a reliable or fair system anymore, with questionable meaningfulness when it comes to the new reality.
> Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree on this, hard. It happens that I'm a person who holds a very unpopular opinion on this matter.
Online games that competed on things like manual dexterity were and still are fun, valuable and entertaining. But it's also true that they're based on a fundamentally flawed principle (the existence of a "perfect shot", if we're talking about aimbots) that simply won't stand the progress.
As someone who believes in transhumanism, I perceive things like aimbots or wallhacks as aids, similar to glasses, exo suits or thermal googles. And I believe that tools are always "good" (if that's applicable term) as the very humanity has foundations in tool invention and use. It's only the consequences of their application (which are heavily context-dependent) have different moral values depending on the outcome.
The world is inherently unfair because everyone is born and raised in different conditions, gaining different bodily and mental capabilities. I despise the idea of leveling everyone down below any arbitrarily "acceptable" capability ceiling of what they can do with their "bare hands, eyes and minds" - in my book, this goes against the idea of progress. I rather wish to see the very opposite. Put bluntly, I want every single gamer to have the best aimbot there is, and the game mechanics is changed to keep things still competitive, challenging, engaging and fun. Which means some games (or possibly even genres) are going to die, but - hey - we aren't playing 3x3 tic-tac-toe anymore either, even though we used to do so when we were little kids with limited brainpower.
Last, but not least, I strongly suspect that the aspect we all hate is not some "cheating" (I believe it's a misdirection) but rather griefing - such as playing against the opponents of drastically different capabilities, aka punching the babies.
Heck, I want to live in a world, where someone making a good bot is celebrated, not stigmatized. Playing against bots can be made fun, too. I loathe the current trends of the industry towards tightening things down, with all the rootkits, and people hating others for something like having a programmable mouse.
I recognize it could be a very naive worldview, but that's what I currently believe in.
And, uh, sorry for a probable off-topic. It just happened that your comment tickled one of my pet peeves :-)
because learning to read and to write is learning to think, and if you're the only person with some autonomy while everyone else regurgitates the same AI slop that's going to give you a lot of opportunity.
Ever since the internet has been around it's been easy to outsource your work, it won't do anything for you in the long run.
I remember reading that Socrates was against writing. His argument was that books don't hold real knowledge because you can't interrogate team. Real knowledge exists only in a man's mind because he can make use of it and answer questions about. I don't quite agree but I do see some merit to the idea. For example, NASA couldn't fly to the moon again by building a Saturn V because even though they still have all the documentation, most of the people who knew how to make use of that documentation are dead or retired.
No I'm not joking.
If nothing else I do like being able to get a relative quick explanation for how to change some obscure or minute functionality in the Windows OS.
Now, would it be better if the Win OS, by default wasn't obnoxiously in the way with the pretense of being "simpler"? Yes!
At least there are some truly free OS's out there that keep the interface consistent through iterations and generally improve overtime.
But I suppose we've been shipping betas as a full release in software for quite a while now. Maybe even soke alphas.
Well too bad. These things are all modeled after human beings... they're literally called large language models. Human beings bullshit, they say rowdy things, and they don't always stay on brand.
The only way to have an exceptional AI is you actually "raise" (train) it like you would a normal human being. That's being learned with the quality of Deepseek's models, although I think they're lying through their teeth about how much it cost to train it. It's in China's interest to bullshit on that metric, so they're bullshitting.
I like it in theory, but the cynical part of me is suspicious they're somehow using it to skew things positive.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/09/legendary-mario-creat...
This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition even worse.
The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space between emulating the physical world and processes that are mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical world is pretty much self-eliminating.
I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That split is not really apparent with the other many products in the Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook, planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change.
Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to spend a working day only hurts the product.
A day later it came back (the chat window embedded into Azure) but now every request generates an error.
I ended up using a combination of other AI, Google and blogs to find what I needed. Even with all the power of AI and all the money they’ve spent on it, Microsoft is still a joke. I wish I didn’t have to use it but it’s going to take time to get off Azure.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
How long ago was this?
It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
Microsoft office supports ODT these days... you can tell them to "just open it in Office" and it will work.
Also, the LibreOffice DOCX export filter is pretty good. Not perfect, but then, if you need that perfection, why not submit a PDF?
---
And finally: To help LibreOffice (and its filters) improve, we need to contribute either money or development time: www.libreoffice.org/donate
And saving as a pdf is a fine compromise when the receiver doesn't have a need to edit the document.
Though to be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter. its was that or the web version of office.
It works, but its clunky, you have font shenanigans, it just overall feels weird and not smooth...
Then again, I'm one of the people who would force you to pry Office 2003 (the last version before the ribbon) out of my cold, dead hands.
I would give anything for a standalone, offline spreadsheet software as robust and powerful as Excel. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist.
I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself.
It's cheap insurance against giving the people who are paying me to collaborate with them a bad experience.
I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.
RIP all the helpdesk employees who have to explain this to end users
They should just tell people to use Google's Chrome remote desktop.
The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit. They are achieving that, so for them this isn’t a disaster. They are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup ecosystem.
(Something the UI reminds you of if you’re on a business plan without it, if you click the button it offers to request a license from your admin unless they remembered to turn that off.)
Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI" products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.
AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut up and buy MSFT
I assume some sort of AI is involved, but I not sure who would ever want to say such things, and my great fear is that one day my motor skills will let me down and I click one of these inane buttons.
I've sent the suggestion (many times) that they put in an option to let me turn this off, but they obviously haven't got around to this one yet. So I don't think that we can expect the opt-out options suggested by the article any time soon.
Mobile app? You must be joking - work occupies too much time as it is! But yes, you are correct it is now there under Setting -> General -> Suggested replies -> Off.
It's always this surprisingly mundane decision behind every fuckup.
Just pump up numbers this quarter, the evident crash in user confidence and subsequent revenues is the next sucker's problem.
Never underestimate the docile nature of a captive audience.
Is this key authentic? Which reseller is this?
Even in our markets, we have office licenses available on Amazon for all prices ...the cheapest ones looking very suspect but not so sure about the ones that cost a decent amount.
Only ever used it for activating Windows, mind, but that works perfectly. Microsoft are clearly aware of this and don't care.
So I just cancelled outright.
Complaining to their support was an utterly miserable fruitless exercise that has me wondering what alternatives there are to this madness for SMEs…
The AI asking what you are going to do with that extra revenue xD
Microsoft just renamed Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows for everyone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 - Jan 2025 (47 comments)
You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42640180 - Jan 2025 (250 comments)
...at least for now...
Had to spend two hours with MS support to get them to cancel my subscription again and actually get me onto the Classic plan. I lost two weeks of my plan that I'd previously paid for, without recompense, and they warned that the Classic plan was a one-time transition thing, so by that measure I'm also out an entire year of the Classic plan compared to if I'd renewed at the old rate on Feb 1, 2025, and then switched to my year of Classic for my Feb 1, 2026 renewal. Also kicked my entire family of their shared plans so had to re-invite and subscribe them all.
I don't even care about the Office apps, all I really care about is OneDrive, but there aren't any great alternatives for that... e.g. Dropbox Family is nearly double the price of 365 Family.
But there's (AFAIK) no GPO to turn Copilot off in the apps.
Deployment looks as great as Microsoft's so far?
At work, everything is Microsoft, Copilot 365 and everything. Gives me a headache using it. And a chuckle seeing IT struggle with disgruntled users…
I don't use MS products but some of my clients do and when I get an account on their system, it's always been a hassle to set things up. It remembers old accounts which i can't delete, Random error 500s, Teams doesn't work in the browser, and several paper cuts which has made me dread the idea of logging in into any MS account.
Serious question: what is the last version of Office (or Office for Mac) that I can purchase that doesn't include AI features? Are there 202x versions still available that will never be updated with AI features?
It might be the last piece of Microsoft software I purchase for a good decade.
Oh boy! It couldn't do anything except append to the end of the document. It couldn't create tables! It couldn't search and replace! It couldn't maintain formatting.
What a failure!
Have to use Windows as an OS? No thanks. Microsoft Teams as core employee platform? Nope.
I get it’s not a choice for many.
Very tired of the popular “productivity” suites, I moved my entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as you can imagine) and now they’re springing Gemini on us, which is less terrible, but we’ll be paying for the pleasure.
PS: 2006 https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/29/1258212/vista-speech-rec...
So far this launch has not worked out right.
Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and it is still there! WTF?
Just my opinion though.
There are times I want a scratch file to stick around without saving it to disk (I know it's still saved to disk somewhere, but that's not the point).
The answer is to close the file you don't want to stick around.
Also for MacOS TextEdit and Preview (can edit images a bit).
It's convenient, I just have to pre-save the original on case I'm experimenting and not versioning.
I got on the online chat and they were able to do it. Took an hour of them faffing around to get it to happen.
They didn't/don't have to offer "Classic" but they do. They make you jump through hoops to get it. That's not stuff that ACCC will do something about.
2026?
I have colleagues who used Copilot for generating slides in PowerPoint. Copilot created slides that are completely unrelated to the prompt.
Apple Intelligence is horrible and hallucinates a ton, but at least it spits out nonsense on the same topic.
1. The effect of being the closest-to-reach solution on MS Windows. 2. Organizational inertia. 3. MS Office' use of OOXML is convoluted and difficult to replicate/reverse engineer, making it difficult to perfectly export to and import from it. 4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt about ditching MS Office. Nobody ever got fired for paying for Microsoft Office. 5. MS marketing
Two weeks ago, we were notified that our accounts had licenses Gemini for Enterprise enabled by default, at no extra cost. With that change came an absolute walloping of AI nudges in Gmail, Calendar and Drive apps.
The only way to turn it off was to contact support so they could enable two hidden checkboxes in the Admin panel that turn off Gemini for good.
Note that any users in a Google Workspace tenant can still enable Gemini outside of the org somehow. Upgrading to Enterprise licenses _might_ prevent this "feature."
I hate this timeline in tech.
Surely we can do this MSFT???? The most basic AI help please, thank you.
Microsoft is evidentially bad at all forms of naming -- I have it on good authority that even (some) of their sales people think so (and will discretely admit to it).
Compared to Solaris?
Compared to OS/2 Warp?
Compared to the completely underdeveloped operating systems of the time?
Don’t stop your comparisons at the low hanging fruit :D
Quite a few things that were promoted as Windows 2000 features to developers ended up being deprecated into oblivion (transactions started implicitly due to entries in the Windows Registry, why did anyone think this a good idea?..), abstracted away (thankfully nobody remembers that Windows Installer has a half-baked SQL underlying it), forgotten on the curb of advancing technology (you can still use asynchronous monikers to define custom protocols for IE, but why would you), or just slowly turning into yet another stratum in enterprise software archaeology (WMI/CIM).
So if it was a watershed moment, it seems like it was more for Microsoft marketing than for general-purpose Microsoft APIs: Windows 2000 was the first NT promoted to consumers, as well as the first NT to run acceptably on respectively contemporary consumer hardware, and the contrast with 9x was indeed stark. But if we are speaking about when Microsoft innovated in its OSes, it really does seem like the period between maybe 1998 and 2005 was a lull, and that contrast that so shocked us then had little to do with the Windows 2000 release specifically and could just as well have happened for NT 4, if only RAM had been cheaper back in 1996. (Recall that Windows 95, née 93, was supposed and even announced to be the last release built on the Win16—or “Windows”—foundation.)
That’s not to say that Microsoft was idle. USB, PCI PnP, ACPI (and before it APM—remember APM?) are all bound to have taken serious kernel-level work, let alone the great Vista video driver rewrite. DirectX for X≠3D basically died, but that last part got really really important. HyperV I hear is competent and people do actually run it.
On the application side, Java was going to be the next big thing on Windows before it was shot in the head, .NET was of course unveiled shortly after Windows 2000, then Vista came along with transactional NTFS and the transactional registry and transactions everywhere were going to be the future (and you can see how that followed from the DCOM/MTS/COM+ work even if it wasn’t marketed that way). And there was WCF and WPF and XAML and XPS’s attempt to displace PDF and replicate Display PostScript and then COM was reborn as Metro/WinRT. And you see how a lot of that last paragraph is a mix of the unhinged (WCF) and the genuinely cool that ended up going nowhere either way? Much like the new Windows 2000 stuff I listed above was a grand vision of the future that fizzled out, there are like a half-dozen grand visions of the future here that were all at various stages at fizzling out at the same time.
Again, none of this is lazy, much of it is even novel. Yet somehow none of it ended up truly significant. Transactional NTFS could have been as large a shift as ZFS—but it wasn’t. Vista’s libraries could finally have brought BeOS’s filesystem-as-a-database to the mainstream—but it didn’t. And now ads in the Start menu are entering their second decade. Part of it is probably the slow death of the desktop in general. I can’t help thinking it’s not all of it, though. In retrospect, Windows 2000’s largely unused new features feel like the start of a trend.
C#/.NET Windows 95 Windows 2000 Windows XP WSL SQL server
for a start.
SQL Server was originally licensed from Sybase.