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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Why does it matter (from the company's ability to fail perspective) what you immediately think of? (yeah, Windows isn't their main product, quick search says it's 10% revenue vs 40% for servers, 22% office, and 9% gaming, so wouldn't that decline be relevant in explaining why it's neglected and fail?)

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Windows for personal computers and Office are the only products that make Microsoft relevant. No one on god's green earth is choosing Windows Server on its own merits: They're picking it for software compatibility reasons stemming from software being written on, and exclusively targeting, Windows Desktop. Hell, most of the office suite is chosen because it's easier to buy more stuff from somebody you're already buying stuff from than to find someone new. No one has ever chosen Teams as the best product in its space.

Very few products Microsoft sells would be worth buying by themselves. They exclusively make mediocre products that are merely the default choice once you've been hoodwinked into buying into Windows or XBOX. If the break Windows, all the money disappears.

Windows server compared to any linux server os is extraordinarily inferior in every regard except for the AD Domain services interface, which is a leftover from probably Windows NT that they haven't screwed with in the interim so it still functions.

The funniest part about Windows Server licensing that I find is the requirement to have CALs (Client Access Licenses) - $5/mo a pop for each device using _any_ service provided by the Windows Server.

You run your Windows Server as a DHCP server? That's $5/mo for the clients to get a DHCP lease.

Of course, one CAL covers all services for the entire client, but it's still funny to me.

I think you’re missing Active Directory, that’s a major reason why corporations stick with Windows.

If you aren't running Windows, you probably aren't using Office. Half the reason for Office is Exchange, and half the reason is the integration of Exchange with Active Directory.

Without any of that, does Office make sense anymore compared to something like GSuite?

Ok, so it's an important dependency, but the fact that it's a small product line can still explain the neglect. For example, is it baffling that companies don't invest time/money in open source libraries they use even though those might be important for their main products?

Correct. IT departments want Active Directory.

Create a user, apportion a 365 licence and boom, they have email, Teams, OneDrive etc. Add them to some groups and they have all the files they need.

Excel is better than Sheets in ways which are important for 0.01% of users, but that is all.

I think Excel is better in Sheets in ways that are important for a lot more users, but it isn’t the same ways for each user.

Also, which I should have said, is for that small group, the missing Sheets features are a show-stopper, not just an annoyance

Yea. Even if you are all MacOS shop, Office has Desktop Applications that run on MacOS.

I find so many companies that use GSuite still buy Office licenses for select employees. There is plenty of places that will just go all in 365 for that reason alone.

I’m mostly not running Windows, but I dislike web apps, so GSuite is out. I could use Numbers, but I need cloud file storage that works on Android, and Office 365 vs Google One are roughly the same price for the storage I need, so I don’t see any particular reason to put the effort in to migrate from Excel/OneDrive to Numbers/Google Drive.

LibreOffice

I've tried it several times, and it's not for me. I want my spreadsheet program to have a UI and UX that's polished for the idiomatic standards of the platforms (macOS and iPadOS) I'm running it on.

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