RIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation.
Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.
Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.
So yeah, if you have any Publisher files, you're fucked.
However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and even MFC, or plain Web, versus anything that builds on top of WinRT, unless the desired API is only available via WinRT.
It was obvious from day one that this would be a failure since it was strongly tied to the Metro UI (awesome on mobile, ugly as hell on desktop) and the Windows app store, all only available on an OS that never was competitive against its predecessor. Also it shipped with a .net implementation that was incompatible with the real one. I'm glad I skipped that tech entirely.
However, that incompatibility you point out, was present throughout all iterations.
Window 8 => 8.1 => 10 required rewrites, UWP/WinUI 2.0 => Win32/WinUI 3.0 dropped .NET Native and .NET 9 still isn't full AOT, C++/CX => C++/WinRT lost Visual Studio tooling and is nowadays in maintenance mode, yet gets sold as being the way for C++ devs.
Meanwhile, most of the faces on community meetings have changed since Windows 8 days, nowadays most seem fresh out of university without any Windows developer experience given the blank stares when questioned about feature XYZ becoming available, and bugs?, you only have to spend sometime digging around the Github repos.
Naturally, even the strongest advocate eventually gives up.
Woodworkers and machinists probably spend as much time on tool upkeep as programmers do futzing with updates, new plug-ins, etc.
And hey the only place left to get hammers sells 50 brands of identical, low quality hammers (all clearly made in the same factory) under a variety of inscrutable, all-caps brand names like AOXIUN and KUDUO.
So actually maybe the advice for hammers and software is the same ... if you rely on it, make sure you can build it yourself.
O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice.
You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app.
It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly.
THAT is a complete dealbreaker.
As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that.
There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.
https://marketplace.appdirect.com/en-US/apps/345798/office-l...
What's the point of coy language like this? This is a general pattern I've noticed of people using weasel words because they think it will protect them from liability. Stop this pretence that saying "thepiratebay" is going to get you in trouble. It won't. This is a forum for adults, so let's talk like adults without bringing euphemisms and self-censorship in here.
Unless you were doing it to seem humorous, in which case go ahead. I didn't find it humorous but humour is subjective.