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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company

Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.

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Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.

Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.

But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.

It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.

Most people are just highly resistant to change, even change for the better.

Ok, but let's be fair. Libre Office et al are terrible.

Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.

We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).

At this point, LibreOffice is much better than whatever Microsoft now sells as an office suite.

Doesn't sound fair at all. What's so "terrible" about it in its current form?

Which one did they switch to?

Here's a case of a recent one which is early in the cycle

https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...

LibreOffice isn't bad at all.

LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.

It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.

I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.

I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.

In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.

I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.

Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.

What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.

But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.

So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.

I recently began using markdown readers/writers like Typora and they’ve blown me away— what LibreOffice Writer could have been. Competing directly with MS Word was a trap.

You have to consider the origins, going back to Star Office in the days where most people were on really slow Dialup if they had internet at all. And even a lot of businesses were almost worse, sharing a single dialup or ISDN connection.

I'm with wolvoleo. I'm forced to use MS Office at work but install only LO on my personal machines. It may lack features or pizzazz but as a reliable, unfussy authoring tool, it serves my needs very well.

> pointlessly going against expectations

If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.

Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.

I started my wife on LibreOffice, putting it on her Mac when her 365 subscription lapsed. She loves it. Her needs aren't fancy, though, and she can create her own or open others' documents and spreadsheets just fine.

The unironic use of "off brand office suite" here is hysterically tragic.

Also, the productivity suite formerly known as Office is these days called "365 Copilot".

You mean Munich, and Microsoft bribed them millions of dollars and a HQ relocation to put Microsoft Office back.

How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.

There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."

I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.

As someone who lived through M$ Access.... lmao.

My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.

Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.

I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.

Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to? What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?

It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.

This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.

MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else.

If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.

It makes more sense if you replace the person buying with "company" and replace "local user" with "employee".

From the article, "its productivity software is used by hundreds of millions of corporate users, a captive audience to whom it can easily promote new AI products."

Their end users are what they ultimately sell. They are captive audiences. This is what monopolies/platforms do. It's never been part of MSFT's DNA to care that much about end user experience. Who they really cater to are the IT decision makers, etc. These people can then show some numbers about "AI adoption" and "productivity" gains on their Power Point slides presented to their bosses. MSFT's value is delivering that to them.

weirdly enough, we asked microsoft to help us build these reports and give us insights into these numbers. The ones in our country were utterly incapable and just send screenshots of powerbi reports from the US team.

So yeah, it really is completely broken internally. monopoly abuse to the fullest, we weren't even allowed by our CTO to do an RFP with potential copilot competitors, and the license cost for 5000 users is insane

Go explain that to the board who assigns you. They all know about AI and FOMO it. Anything non-AI will be burried and thrown away. Trend is not close to reversal yet. We need more AI-driven disasters before rejection of AI-centric course will be a socially acceptable course of actions.

Plus. Who cares about users? Stock evaluation of the mag7 has few to do with the users and the products.

If you think about the shareholders as their users, being AI-first is being user-first, because it makes number go up.

This only works in a competitive market, not for monopolistic walled gardens like Microsoft.

I thought it was cloud first, or was it mobile first, I don't remember.

I believe they skipped blockchain first so at least there is that.

No, they were all-in on Blockchain-as-a-service on Azure for a hot minute, and it's still included in their supply chain protection stack (which in fairness is one of the few use cases that makes a lot of sense)

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