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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility

And for reselling you the same office suite every couple of years.

(Full disclosure, I worked there in the 2000s... So if anything I should be biased the other way.)

Right, but if you bought office 2000 it was established that you would get to keep using office 2000 for as long as you wanted

There are probably still a minority using Office 2000 out there, because it still does everything they need.

For a while I had installed in wine for frontpage

Office 97 not only has everything most people need (wordpad has all features most people need; most users have no need for Excel or other office tools) it also starts up faster and uses less resources. The only question is do you actually need any of the massive quantity of features in modern office, or is word processing today still fairly simple for you. And maybe if you don't like MDI and want your multiple windows instead (the thing I miss most about old office is having 15 documents open in a single window when writing essays in school, without cluttering up alt-tab or the taskbar. That and the toolbar button that initiates the active screensaver). If you want to use your cloud storage (you really don't need it most likely) you'll have to use a sync tool instead of having it directly. Turn off macros for security and make sure it can actually run (no idea when office stopped using 16 bit components), and I recommend firewalling it as well, but office doesn't really need to be up to date.

I was one of those, way past its EOL. I could never switch to this braindead “ribbons” UI and refused to learn this idiotic new scheme so I stayed with office 2k. And then I switched to libreoffice.

There was an OOXML compatibility layer for Office 2000, though the latest version of that only runs on Win XP and later, but I suspect LibreOffice would be more compatible with OOXML made with current versions of Office.

Correct, but my point was if they had taken measures to counteract that nobody would have been surprised.

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