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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

> They lose a big customer for their cloud services. Even worse considering that now, using the AI they helped fund, everyone can compete with their sub-par products. GitHub is a good candidate for disruption, and that’d be just the start.

Look, I'm a Microsoft hater like the rest of us, but calling Microsoft's products sub-par discredits the author a good bit. I invite anyone who thinks this to try and compete with them. Go after something like Word, for example. Then prepare to be awed by what some of the most brilliant programming minds ever can produce after grinding for four decades.

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If I saw a helicopter crashed into a tree, I don't have to be a helicopter pilot to know it's not an ideal state of a helicopter and something/some people failed.

When I'm using MS Word and it takes 20 seconds to cold launch on a machine that's magnitudes faster than any computers 25 years ago where it launched near instantly, I can tell something is going wrong. When all of their software is harassing me to use AI in ways I don't want to use it, I can tell something is going wrong.

your comment sums up the conflict.

I dont know if you noticed, but there was a shifting of the goal post from "sub-par" to something wrong/sub-optimal.

The best helicopter you can buy may in fact crash into trees sometimes.

Microsoft's products do not occasionally fail, they're constantly going out of their way to block users from doing basic tasks through ads and dark patterns. It makes some KPI go up so some asshat product manager can get a promotion, and they never lose users because 99% of their users are hostages.

I'm not saying they are great. I am pointing out the difference between absolute and relative performance.

You can have a shitty product as long as you are better than the next guy.

My fortune 50 company is migrating to microsoft because they dont like their current tools

Sub par is not the right word, the right word is feature creep.

markdown have much less of that brilliance and thankfully I also needed none of it.

Last time I authored a word document is probably 2 years ago for a government interaction.

You can have an opinion about a tool as a user, without ever having ability to create such a tool yourself, that's literally what every tech and auto reviewer does.

Sure, and the less you understand about the tool’s fundamental capabilities, the less useful your opinion is. The best reviewers have deep knowledge.

You can use this logic to say all products are perfect and any criticisms of them by users are moot because their creator knows them best.

I'm sure Word is full of arcane backwards compatible tricks that 20% of users use, but I find it hard to differentiate the Pareto 80% of the product from Google Docs or any other competitor (LibreOffice?) Adding rich text, tables, headings and colors is pretty much a solved problem for all of these softwares. Adding images or handling more complex layouts sucks everywhere, it's not like that Word has a great user experience and the other don't. All of them are bad. IMHO, if we had any of the competitors being the de-facto standard for word processing, the vast majority of users wouldn't feel the difference. Power users would for sure, but I'm not sure they're many or they use existential features. If Word didn't have a near monopoly in office settings due to aggressive marketing, OS presence and a proprietary file format that constantly changes and never renders well outside of Microsoft products, it could disappear without anyone (save Microsoft) losing much.

Yes. That 80% you find useful is served fine by Google Docs, but there’s a good reason the enterprise overwhelmingly goes for Word, and it lives deep in that 20% and a lot of the time has zero overlap with others.

Microsoft's AI, on the other hand, is underwhelming at the moment and might well go the way of Windows Phone. Plus enough people hate the copilot icons everywhere that Microsoft is hinting at dialing down a bit.

MS Office should last a while if they stop calling it "Copilot 365 Office" or whatever it was.

The state of GitHub and Windows 11 certainly qualify as sub-par.

There are some frustrating parts, but subpar is an odd way to describe GitHub to me. I’m pretty happy with what they’re doing, and find the UX super helpful. I do agree Actions needs a debug mode but otherwise I get a ton of value out of the service for $20/month?

Specifically their failure to meet reasonable uptime requirements. I can't run a 99.9 service on a 99.0 platform.

I think Github represents 'par'. Plenty of stuff worse and plenty of stuff better. Overall it's what most people expect a coding social media site to be because it set those expectations. Those of us who are only looking for code management (including issues/PRs/etc) are easily satisfied elsewhere.

It has had some really bad reliability issues recently. In terms of uptime, it has been a poor product.

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