I hate you Microsoft
henriquenunez.eu
henriquenunez.eu
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me.
And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm.
I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.
Salesforce, Microsoft, Atlassian, and co. are obviously sold on their merits.
It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else.
About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram.
But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format.
Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
CeTZ is a really good package, but I still reach for a tool like Omnigraffle if I need to make a really complicated diagram.
One application of AI I have found useful is in the quick composition of graphs via text-based graph description languages: graphviz (the great granddaddy), mermaid.js, plantuml, and of course derivatives like WireViz and CircuiTikZ.
A typical ask would be something like "generate a mermaid network diagram showing the relationships of all markup languages". It's surprisingly good.
A neat trick you can do if writing in Asciidoc: conditional directives are pre-processor directives, which means they're interpreted before the graphing engine goes to work. So you can make art that has sections which can toggle on and off based on document variables (the Asciidoc lingo for these is "attributes" but using that word can be confusing for old XML hands). Very neat when you have a block diagram you want to reuse for lots of different configurations.
[1] Unless I need 3d, in which case I'm afraid I like Blender a lot. Even more than Asciidoc.
They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
How bad can a software be? Really?
Apple gives you neither choice or value, but everything just "work$". People come to me saying I used windows and it sucked, and that's because they are comparing a 500 dollar Acer laptop with a 1500 Macbook Air with no knowlge on how to properly use Windows.
Both have their market place, unfortunately the users with the least knowledge are the ones always complaining about Windows. And, let me tell you, when something is broken with their Mac, they also don't know what to do. See OP's post as a perfect example. They blame MS not their IT admin.
It's the reason Apple calls their support Genius bar. They are trying to message out "Hey, you really are smart, we are just geniuses". Well, you're not.
Also, just quickly poking through their various enterprise plans (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...), I found several that offered Web & Windows but not Mac, and none that only allowed editing on Web like you describe.
And they are paying microsoft a lot. The whole financial, HR, marketing departments and even some research groups use "Teams" to communicate.
It's unbeliveable.
Admins can reallocate licenses of different types among accounts or change them completely. That it worked fine a few months ago means nothing. Your account currently doesn't have a desktop entitlement at all, be it macOS or Windows.
Talk to your M365 admins and beware of lies they might tell you to cover up the truth.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities;
"NFP doesn't mean no money" "Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah"
VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
"Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
What have we become?
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
My guess would be, that your university run out of A3 licenses. You got an basic A1. Every education account gets at least A1. If you just created your Microsoft account, you need to wait till a license is assigned. This is automatic but not fast.
Office is not free for students. For every teacher an institution gets an ammount of student licenses. If there are a lot more students then teacher then not everyone gets a license.
Bottom line, do not use microsoft products at all. With new rules in germany (europe?), public sector is supposed to use open document standards anyway.
It will be interesting to see how I do with my Linux desktop...
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.
Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
It seems to work fine for me, with a legit Office 365 account.
I can't promise it will fix your problems but it's the "real", full-fat Windows version of Office, so it might be a starting point if you want to avoid virtualization.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history.
Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore.
Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
We Hate You Microsoft.
LibreOffice. OnlyOffice. Collabora Office. Keynote.
While it is scummy that MS did this, the author needs to grow a pair and look up the millions of ways to open a .pptx.
Note that I did not say create a presentation. I said open a presentation.
The document in particular has a load of animations, videos, and "rich" powerpoint resources that have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software.
Remember?
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust....
I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies...
You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.
Criminal all the way down.
If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.