Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block

theregister.com

46 pointsBrajeshwar35 comments

> Microsoft's solution is a move to Teams, which the company says "offers modern meeting experiences."

"Modern" is becoming a tech euphemism for regression.

I used to say "follow the money", now it's more like "follow the promo" because of today's promo-driven culture.

"Modern" in my mind has come to mean:

* Designed at the highest possible level, on top of multiple layers of frameworks, libraries, and dependencies that the developers do not fully understand.

* Full of anti-patterns that implicate privacy and security in a variety of ways.

* Designed as a walled garden, offering hobbled interoperability with other solutions, while attempting to vertically integrate features better implemented elsewhere -- or, in some cases, the exact opposite: designed as an excessively minimal solution, leaving concerns that should be addressed within its own scope unhandled.

* Unlikely to be viable for long-term deployment due to high time sensitivity in its dependencies; correspondingly fragile in ways that aren't fully accounted for.

* Built with a UI adhering to no coherent design patterns, targeting the presumed ability limits of people who will never likely use the product, while being wholly insufficient for those who actually do.

* Released prematurely with half-implemented features, unmitigated bugs, and incomplete documentation.

* Overhyped to the point that the majority of public discussion about the project consists of vague, unverifiable bullshit.

> "Modern" in my mind has come to mean:

In my mind it's even simpler: an attempt to confuse newness and trendiness with goodness to mask the smell of shit.

The truth is a modern turd is still a turd.

They only took uh... 6 years to finally let you move the annoying bar when you're screen sharing, which always gets in the damn way of either a browser tab you need, or hitting Debug in Visual Studio. Drove me to hatred of Teams.

I also really hate that "Teams" within Teams don't have normal text channels like Slack or Discord, they're forums. I can't stand this design choice and refuse to use it.

It's such a frustrating app where the bar to entry was insanely low. I do like their office integration, but its like, well you couldn't have butchered that up.

I've never seen a "normal" user not confused by the difference between Teams's teams and Teams's channels (where every "channel" belongs to a "team"). I'm pretty sure that's reason #1 why most users use only group chats and never use channels. They simply don't understand how it works because it's too confusing.

If you click on that bar and press ctr-w it goes away without stopping the sharing.

That was a mind blown for me when someone told me about that... Not sure how anyone found out about it, I man wouldn't anyone expect that to... Stop sharing too?

> Teams don't have normal text channels like Slack or Discord, they're forums

If you can get notifications sorted out and allow notification on creation of a topic but not on messages within a topic, I really like this choice.

The plague of Slack is constant pings in a channel that you need to need to monitor and thus can't mute, thanks to participants who refuse to start a thread and insist on having extended conversations in the root of the channel. Forcing thread/topic creation solves that problem.

Teams was an unmitigated dumpster fire during its first ~4 years of existence, but I'd argue it's quite reasonable now. This is my favorite feature:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

I really miss this in places like Discord.

Teams is better than Skype or Lync.

Is it better than Slack? Unclear.

It is better than it used to be. Assuming you have noticed it acting weird and restarted it as many as 3 times until all the updates have been applied.

They should axe Sharepoint, God, that will be such a beautiful day.

Sharepoint is the ultimate form of productivity theater for managers. It feels like you're doing a lot, and it's specifically designed to give managers that dopamine rush they're looking for, but the reality is they're basically doing nothing. The site is impossible to navigate, and they may as well be playing candy crush instead of organizing folders and creating custom "pages".

It always amazes me that it usually takes 10 seconds to fully render a result page when I use Office 365 search to look for internal resources. Apparently people at Microsoft think this is acceptable.

There are worse alternatives.

Don't encourage them.

Honestly, what is worse than Sharepoint? I would prefer using pen and paper over Sharepit.

At the risk of identifying myself to colleagues, I have a comment I regularly make on SharePoint sites I end up owning inside my company:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering Sharepoint; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee

> I would prefer using pen and paper over Sharepit.

I use pen and paper for a lot of purposes for which other people use some arbitrary application or smartphone app. This is thus in my opinion just a matter of what you are used to and what your taste is (I often say: "Simply use the tool/application that you know well: it will often be suitable.").

> "This change is part of our ongoing commitment to modernizing productivity experiences and focusing on cloud-first solutions," the company said.

Seems like a good time for jumping ship and trying out OnlyOffice.

I don't get this strategy, honestly.

There's plenty of sensitive environments that need to be air-gapped from the internet where Microsoft's products dominate.

They seem to be giving up on that market entirely.

But there’s still the option of using the desktop apps. Personally I hate using browser-based apps, but then I’m also old.

Back when people still used dial-up, I once observed a sys admin in our IT department using a custom, proprietary Windows application developed by a vendor, used for ordering purposes. The whole thing was proprietary, client, protocol, and server, and it was awesome to behold.

That was pretty common back in those days. With the appification of a lot of websites, it’s coming back (albeit using rest instead of a proprietary protocol).

Except Windows itself is moving to make sure you're always online and requires an internet connection & Microsoft account to log in.

I mean sure, this isn't the case if you're on an AD. I just wonder for how long.

Windows moved to Always Online, but I moved to Never on Windows. Funny how that all works.

I have a windows vm that I use perhaps every few weeks for sketchup (because for the life of me, I cannot get wine to run it correctly -- it'll run but not SAVE...).

Every time I run the VM, it has windows updates to install. I guess it's a bit nicer swiping away from the VM and doing something else when it updates but it's a real solid reminder why I "moved away".

Funny, actually.

I've noticed there is a point in dual booting where you do enough in Linux that you can't get back to windows without it updating. This pushes you to stay longer and longer in Linux, to avoid the dreaded update.

I've already seen a few people accidentally pestering themselves out of windows this way.

> Every time I run the VM, it has windows updates to install

You can disable with group policy. Or stop after boot the update service.

To be fair, every time I log into Ubuntu there are updates to install.

This is silly. "Cloud first" and "cloud only" are different things.

this denial that companies seem to have about the lack of a true need for on-premise infrastructure is maddening, because it is truly needed by some; cloud solutions simply do not suffice. Microsoft is doing this to turn one-time payments into subscriptions and they're calling it "cloud first". Call it "cloud only" if that's what you mean, you dorks.

Too many people with MBAs in this industry. You lose ALL contact with reality once you get an MBA, and reality matters little compared to revenue and perceived value delivery.

I suspect if Office Online Server was a significant revenue source, they would keep it up.

Instead: Remember that storing files in the cloud is highly commoditized, especially by Non-Microsoft companies. The APIs to hook cloud storage into Windows are well-documented. This is a niche best served by small-medium sized businesses, and/or open-source software.

I changed jobs about three months ago. They use Microsoft. I still don't really know what Teams is or what it's for. I will continue ignoring it until I get yelled at.

I use it for chat, for which it's absurdly heavy-weight but it's what everyone else in the office uses, and to be a fly on the wall at various meetings. That's about it. It's not terrible. All virtual meeting platforms suck, and Teams isn't notably worse than any of them that I've used.

To me Teams sucks very hard, especially when running it on Firefox based browsers. It takes 30 seconds to load a page with colorless icons and empty content (while other websites load instantly), followed by another 10 seconds to prompt me with a login button. Every. Single. Time.

It’s absolutely a bloated pig for a chat app. But it mostly works and is what we use at work so <shrug>.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com