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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago.

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.

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Well there is only so much you can do with Word and Outlook.

Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting a long time ago.

What about the super exciting new Teams and Outlook!

Exciting, and not in a good way.

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.

You mean super aggravating.

I was trying to join a meeting in Teams from the calendar when up popped a “How are you enjoying Calendar” star rating dialog. I’ve never once listed “Office Calendars” amongst things that I enjoy. Much less now with this needy feedback blocking me from entering the meeting.

Those constant pop ups are super annoying

Excel has interesting new features. It’s the only reason I'm contemplating upgrading.

Would you mind writing down some of the exciting new Excel features? I am asking as an Excel user that 5 years ago used to love this tool (so much so that I would have paid for Excel if my employers did not provide it for free). Excel 2010 was peak Excel for me.

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.

XLOOKUP, XMATCH, dynamic arrays and related functions. There are also new regex functions, but it seems that those didn’t make the cut for Excel 2024, unfortunately. I had situations in the past where lambdas would have been handy.

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