Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off.
I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Not only did the megacorp CEO's drop the ball on AI... we've got them gloating over widespread firing of engineers due to AI and then quotes like "I'm good for my $80B" like its his own personal money bag. And now they're force feeding crappy alpha AI products. The egos are well out of hand. And they give this group the name "The Magnificent Seven". WTF have we become. We trust these companies to be stewards of AGI/ASI?
So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol.
I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" so it doesn't surprise me that 365 went the same way.
I'm saying this and I'm a person that's usually extremely enthusiastic about new tech, but I'm just burnt out on these companies trying to shove AI down our throats.
Had it been opt-in and gradual, I would be far more optimistic and enthusiastic. I guess my question is "why such a rush?". Even Apple rushed into it with something half-baked and unfinished.
> So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol.
The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.
Exactly zero management or executive positions at my workplace have had the “can an AI do this?” exercise intended to explore ways of reducing headcount.
CEO is the one job role that AI can’t take because AI lacks accountability. Who is the person using the AI that will get blamed by the board if they screw up? That’s the CEO, even if you decide to give them a different title.
CEOs also lack real accountability though. Every time something goes really wrong they claim that they have no responsibility because people below them caused the problems.
How the F do you square that circle? If you're at the top you either are responsible or you aren't.
That applies to many roles. Lawyer AI can’t actually lawyer because someone needs to be accountable. War fighting AI needs to know where to kill. Doctor AI needs handholding. If we can find a legal construct for an AI surgeon operating on your child I think we can find one for an agent running a marketing company working on shareholders behalf.
Yeah, the accountability argument doesn't make sense to me from a practical viewpoint. The benefit of accountability is that it provides a path to avoiding repeated errors. There are other ways to achieve this using software tools.
I've been saying for a long time that the real definition of 'personhood' is the ability to take liability. If something can be sued in court (not counting civil forfeiture sophistry) then it counts as a person.
How about "If it gets sentenced to prison time" instead because corporations routinely get sued in court only to be charged a small percentage of the profit they make through criminal activity and that isn't "liability" it's just paying the justice system a cut of the action as a cost of doing business.
What accountability does Elon Reeve Musk, richest grifter on the planet and CEO of half a dozen companies ever face?
An AI can be turned off and replaced at any time.
> The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.
Sorry, but that’s not true at all. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Who is replacing the CEO of a company with AI? The board? The board doesn’t want/can’t run the company. They will hire someone to “run the CEO AI”? Won’t that just be a CEO using AI? Maybe that makes it so the CEO is paid less Because now they just run OpenCEOv4? I don’t see it happening though. Also a very large portion of the day to day of CEO level execs at those big companies interpersonal and/or performative. You won’t be replacing that with AI anytime soon. You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Lets say that CEOs are no more or less replaceable with AI than all the other jobs.
Throwing away all the humans to replace them with AIs is a move only an AI CEO would make, because and AI couldn't give less of a shit if something it does blows up in its face. Well, apparently real CEOs couldn't care less either. Imagining you're going to run a successful software organization (once you've hollowed out the people who both understand the work and actually give a shit about it) is insane. These people know that it will blow up, but they hope that it is only after they can rake in their bonus pay for the mounds of short term profits that result form layoffs, after which they'll float away under their golden parachutes leaving their former companies to collapse under the weight of institutionalized incompetence.
Yes, I agree with the picture you're painting here, but it befuddles me where all these grifters think they'll go?
They'll have to live in bunkers for the rest of their lives.
Imagine that you're one of them, and you want to go watch a game (or a T. Swift concert) -- so you hop on your private jet and go to the stadium/arena. If you happen to be caught on-camera and your face is up there, on the Jumbotron, every single person there is gonna boo you. That's what your life will be like. What's the point?
again, that also makes no sense. If AI reaches that level of competence, then why would it only replace the CEO position or be better at being a CEO than say a people's manager? an engineer, HR, legal, sales, marketing etc? In fact, why not just create an "All AI company". you just register it, and run OpenCompanyAI, feed it some parameters "You are a company selling
This just isn't true unfortunately, but the angle of attack that is true is AI replacing the need for the rest of the company for you to be able to make money as an individual.
>I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do"
My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".
Microsoft not the only one.Mac OS upgrades effectively brick their own hardware. I’ve got a beautiful 27 inch iMac with a retina screen 5k … unusable now on last 2 OS updates.
“As to be expected, macOS Sequoia support is still in active development. This is a community-driven project, and as such we ask users to keep expectations in check and use older OSes if you encounter issues that affect you.”
This seems extremely niche. Maybe even petty? Why do you care where the taskbar is? Remember that every change breaks someone's workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/
It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+, why on earth would they remove it? I've had mine aligned to the top of the screen for as long as I can remember, and there's even 3rd party tools that restore this basic ass behavior in Win11 (not that I'll ever use that bloatware willingly again). M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.
But can you explain why this feature is/was so important? The fact that there are 3rd party tools that can restore it makes it even more marginal. There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use, it seems strange that this very marginal one should get someone up in arms.
> M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.
No, it's because "M$" doesn't think it's an important feature. There's no incompetence. Do you actually believe what you said?
Is this some form of OCD or hypersensitivity? Because I struggle to understand the type of mind that cares at all about this. And how do such people go through life, especially working in software, where things change constantly?
Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day? Should we disallow changing background images? Should we let people set color accents as they can right now? Should we even let them choose where they want their desktop icons to be, or which desktop icons they can have there? Or should we disable choosing which applications can be locked in the taskbar? Are all of these equally incomprehensible as the choice of where the giant-ass taskbar that permanently fills up a non-negligible percentage of your screen real estate sits to you?
Would you also defend any of the above?
Also, this has been a feature since the XP days, people have built muscle memories around it, and then for literally no reason M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them and restore this basic functionality that has been there forever.
> There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use
And this is a good thing to you somehow? I don't want my OS switching up on me at random every day of the week, I want to login the next day and have everything be where I last placed it, not have some troglodyte PM at M$ trying to suckle on the promotional teet decide where my icons go for me.
> "M$"
Are you perhaps one of the aforementioned troglodyte PMs over there? I've noticed that M$ employees get pretty bothered about that little dollar sign in the name.
Perhaps the problem is a deeper one, which is constant and likely unnecessary UI makeovers. But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto:
> Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day?
All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
> M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them
But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
> But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto
For me it's personally not, it's mostly about how slow and bloated W11 feels. On my 9800X3D (an insanely powerful and fast chip!), explorer is slower than it was in the windows 95 days on the i386 of yore. They've converted half of everything in Windows into a web view and you can feel it, don't even get me started on the adware.
> All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, to me the taskbar is one of the most central parts of a modern OS next to file navigation and things like the start menu. It sits on your screen, visibly and permanently, and takes up a good chunk of your screen real estate. I know for many people they prefer it vertical because otherwise they have a kilometer-wide, mostly-empty taskbar taking up ~5-10% of the bottom of their screen. For me I keep it on the top of the screen because A) It's what I'm used to since the XP days and B) I find it easier to reach for than on the bottom, because my cursor is pretty much always on the top half of the screen rather than the bottom half.
> But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
You could make this same argument for basically every feature though, including the ones I listed. Why not remove background images and let it be handled by some 3rd party tool as well? It's about as basic as customization can get in an OS, so it should be handled natively by the OS. Not to mention that, due to it being 3rd party, it's also prone to breaking on Windows updates, and some applications rely on the OS to handle things like where to place the application window, and having things hack around OS-imposed limits like this does lead to weird behaviors and bugs.
It shouldn't require someone download 3rd party tools for functionality this basic, especially since it's already been in there since the basically the inception of the OS. Even MacOS lets you do the vertical taskbar/Dock, and that's the epitome of closed-down customization (not that Apple doesn't have similar problems, such as requiring 3rd party tools for external mice or window tiling via Rectangle).
> But can you explain why this feature is/was so important?
1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]".
2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits.
3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools.
4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges.
5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space.
6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore.
It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem).
> It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases
Not only that, but the users who did move the taskbar are more likely to be the "power users" who will help to evangelize Windows in an organization. Those are users who Microsoft should want to keep happy. When you lose them, you lose any sort of grassroots support in an org.
It's a small change in terms of code and number of users affected. It's a big change to the affected users and in user perceptions.
Apparently, it isn't that rare, as I too used to place the taskbar at the top of the screen (I switched to Mac 10 years ago). I simply wanted the taskbar to be near the menu bar so I wouldn't have to move the mouse more than necessary - that was the first thing I customized when installing Windows.
Well, it is not software developers that won't be needed anymore. It is large corporations. If a small team of developers can make huge projects. There is no reason for them to work for a large business.
I think this part depends on the person. I've personally been programming since I was a kid making games for my TI-83+, and in all that time and fatigue have been the limiting factors in how much of what I wanted to build that I actually could build.
So something able to write code rigorously enough to replace SWEs would be an absolute dream! I love programming with all my heart, and it's the thing I've spent most of my life doing... but I feel in love with it because it could make things.
A way to make even more things at a greater scale I'm individually capable off is such a joyous idea that if anything, I get annoyed at the idea they'd tease that without knowing it's possible (of course, they're trying to raise so...)
The aspect of wanting to replace SWEs is completely ok with me and I think there should be a rush to see it through. Imagine if every researcher could have an army of top tier SWEs at their beck and call for example. Or even imagine learning to program alongside a personal world-class expert from day 1, after all the fact AI could do it wouldn't mean we couldn't still do it ourselves if we wanted to.
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Unlike the "AGI in 3 years crowd" I don't actually know that it's possible, but where I agree with them is that the route there is probably not going to be a slow burn. Most companies need to demonstrate some external value along the way or they won't be able to continue, hence the chasing down of usecases that they can ship today.
Unfortunately not all of us can raise $1B on a txt file and a promise not to release our product :)
I would guess that the pushback is more about the possible economic imbalance that will happen and less about being replaced on the actual effort of coding.
Maybe because I'm not originally from this country my view is different, but I think the fact the majority of the world's increase in population is about to happen in extremely poor places that will be subject to the worst of climate change means that the AI will have to be immensely powerful to actually increase worse imbalances than we're already headed for.
So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.
After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.
(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)
I am almost certainly wrong, and we will find some solution, or sue the hell out of the genAI firms, but this is the economic issue I see. It competes with productivity as a core economic driver of human wellbeing:
Concentration of wealth.
GenAI consumes content, even that created in low resource languages and regions, and spits it back out, separating the creator from the traffic due to their labor.
This isn’t entirely unknown - we’ve all been inspired by someone else stuff and copied our own.
Now, genAi firms have inserted themselves into this loop. And they’re cutting out the creator.
The scaled, automated pseudo workers that these firms promise, are owned by the firms. The productivity they create accrues to a small group of foreign multi nationals.
Economically - this shouldn’t be an issue. More productivity, means more capability of people doing newer work.
I do expect this to happen. However firms are also very good at making sure they capture the greater share of the market.
That researcher probably wouldn't have an army of SWEs at his or her disposal but be out of a job like the SWEs. If they get AI to a point where it can be a safe and competent senior SWE, it'll be able to fill a huge breadth of other roles as well. Human creativity isn't looking like quite the moat it was supposed to be.
Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work, possibly for good, nor are we in any way ready for the kind of power certain tech billionaires would have if their workforce were to scale with just the amount of hardware they own.
At this point I kind of hope the current breed of AIs will plateau quickly and stay there for a while so that maybe society can catch up instead of getting surprise bulldozed by a gaggle of tech giants.
Of what use are the peasants in an AI driven and dominated feudal society, though. Maybe us peasants be useful in wars or battles between the different lords, but this would also probably be performed by automated drones and robots.
It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though. Who’s gonna buy their crap and for what reason will they they create anything? The whole thing seems like a massive doom spiral.
> It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though.
You have machines that can design and build mega-yachts, mansions, private space craft, ....
You can afford to purchase vast areas of land from people selling whatever they have to get by, ...
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Asking what billionaires will do when they can't sell to the poor, is like asking why the human economy didn't crash ages ago because we have any off planet aliens to sell to.
Or how did we keep the economy going all this time, given the ants and trees couldn't afford anything we produce?
All an economy needs is someone with the means of production, who is able to get resources, and use those resources to produce something they want. I.e. you can have a working economy with just a single person. Or self-interested AI.
Hermits have an economy. Now imagine the hermit has trillions of dollars of resources and square miles of intelligent circuitry and robotic servants.
That hermit doesn't need the rest of us. Customers? Where we are going, we don't need customers.
> Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work
Our societies were built before there was a technology that could replace its smartest people with machines that never tire?
I don't get why people keep trying to imagine current society + super-intelligent AI: by definition it won't be our current society if we can actually get there would it?
I mean if we have AI that can even replace the researchers (I wouldn't dream so boldly tbh), imagine how much faster the pace of scientific discovery becomes. Imagine how much more efficient we can make power generation and transmission, discover new treatments for disease, democratize learning at costs never before possible...
I don't love to spend too much time daydreaming what we could do down that because SWEs already feels like a bit of a pipedream, so all novel research being automated away is just completely in fantasy land... but realistically we're already on a pretty terrible trajectory otherwise.
Our next billion people are about to be born into some of the worst off parts of the planet. AI becoming good enough to replace researchers would be an infinitely more positive trajectory than some of the others we could end up on on otherwise.
Social media could have been utopian, too, yet those apps are algorithmic manipulation hellscapes that threaten to bring down even the most robust democracies. The same people who make it so are poised to be the ones in control of these AIs. I don't think they want the kind of utopia you imagine.
What I described doesn't have to be utopian in an absolute sense, just significantly better than where we're currently headed.
I think a lot of the unchecked pessimism around super-intelligent AI is just people being a bit naive or shut off from the reality of just how terrible things are going to be over the next century.
We're waging 25% tariffs over planefuls of people, what's going to happen when it's 100 million people trampling over borders trying to escape disease, famine, and temperatures incompatible with human life?
Compared to that, even if these companies abuse their ownership of AI and monopolize the gains, an AI capable of producing novel research and development by itself would still bring us much closer to solving major problems than otherwise.
And you think the tools that are, as we speak, boiling rivers and lakes in order to power the insanely resource-hungry AIs is the solution to any of those problems, such as famine and rising temperatures? If anything, they're accelerating us towards these issues.
There's about to be 500 billion dollars invested in generating even more electricity for these monstrosities, instead of literally anything else actually useful today that we could be putting towards climate research or renewable energy. Nope, we're just gonna generate even more spam and bullshit while spinning up nuclear reactors to power it all.
If they don't pan out we won't even reach 500 billion dollars actually invested and tbe bubble will pop. And it'll take many many many trillions before AI is even close to the biggest reason climate change is killing people.
People tend to take different pieces of mutually exclusive end states. Like my comment is speaking to a fantasy like outcome where again, we have AI that puts all researchers out of jobs.
If it can do that (which I don't think it will, but if we're dreaming it), let it boil oceans, let them abuse it, you can become unfathomably wealthy by solving world hunger.
Let them force countries to take out loans that practically put then in OpenAI's permanent debt to access the advancements they come up with.
It's still better than the alternative, and it still allows room for them to be as evil as they want.
I mean either way countries are going to become indebted to companies eventually if we keep down the current path. I don't see how the ultra wealthy can't use mass upheaval and desperation to secure extremely cheap labor and solidfy their power even without AI.
At least now, even if it's for their own personal gain and amusement, they can trivially solve
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It's like we're talking about someone potentially developing a cure for all cancer, but everyone is worried because the company behind it is evil and will hoard it for themselves while charging $1B per dose: let's still get to that cure if it can be developed.
It'll be a truly miserable and awful world watching people we know die while there's a cure, and watching them die because they're not able to pay this villain... but today there's no cure, no proof one can exist, no hints on how to get one.
It's better to have the cure and no clue how to fix the broken situation that it creates, than to have no cure and no clue how to fix cancer, because one is a problem of people/power/ethics and the other is a problem of unknown proportions and guaranteed ongoing suffering not more damaging than having a cure, no matter how inequitable access to it is.
Though I think you misunderstand or underestimate human nature of self interest. Everyone that is in control of a superpower like this will abuse it. Be it on a presidential level, be it on CEO level, be it a major shareholder of a foreign NGO. That is why we had democratic splits of types of power in the first place. I say "had" because the trend globally is leading to right wing autocratic ideas due to manipulation of social media.
Human self interest and egocentric world views is what gave us this mess.
The only thing capable of evening out the odds is a federalistic decentralized approach, which we desperately need for AI. Something like a legislative system for lots of overfitted mini AI assistants that also give outliers a chance to be the social trend.
Otherwise we will land up with the ministry of truth, which, right now is Facebook and TikTok effectively. The younger generations that grew up with social media tend heavily towards populist right wing ideas because those are easily marketable in 30 seconds. Paint the bad guy, say that it is established fact, next video. Nobody is interested in the rationale behind it, let alone finding and discussing a compromise like you would in a real debate that wants to find a solution.
We need to find a way to change beliefs through rationale rather than emotions. Ironically this problem is also reflected in trained LLMs that turn into circlejerks because they've learned that from the dataset of us easily manipulateable humans.
I don't think it's that simple. For one thing, AI isn't a democratizing force. If it's as good as you think it will be, it will be less like having a good education and more like having an indentured servant. Some people will have whole fleets of such servants doing their bidding, while others will have none.
For another, research isn't an end unto itself. As you note, for some people an already-unfathomable level of societal knowledge has resulted in nothing but continued poverty. Benefit from scientific knowledge requires a stable economy full of consumers who can and will purchase high-tech items. Where will that wealth come from once the value of human intellectual labor has been so undercut by cheap AI intellectual labor? Without the capitol to make AIs work for us, most if not many people will be left to live their life as servants to AIs so that those AIs are able to have autonomy in the real world.
My thought has been they are forcing it knowing nobody, as in 98% of people, would give a crap about most of the AI features. People have been using these tools for decades now to solve their problems and there's a lot of muscle memory to overcome even if the 'new way' were in fact better. I myself have found I only adopt new software, and techniques (including things like using/learning keyboard shortcuts, etc), that's a minimum of 2X better/faster than my de facto personal preference or legacy approach of tackling the problem. And, even if >10X, if it's something I do infrequent I still won't be interested in changing my ways. I have a lot of muscle memory that goes into how I build something like a new spreadsheet, even complicated ones. I'm not interested in putting AI into that process.
I have a grandfather that actually took an early retirement package, age 55, specifically because company gave him an ultimatum regarding switching from typewriter to a PC in the 80s. I feel like AI is pushing me towards making that same choice, I don't really care for using it in my work specifically (have no ultimatum at present).
I use it sparsely and it's more of a toy/novelty to me. Although, I do see how it helps other fields more/less and could replace humans in some professions - I'm not a SWE.
Fascinating strategy. It looks like they're forcing everybody into it, so it's opt-out, except there is no opt-out in the initial version of the app. They seem to be in the process of adding it now.
> In your app (for example, Word), select the app menu, and then go to Preferences > Authoring and Proofing Tools > Copilot > Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox > Close and restart the app.
> If you do not see the related button, it means this button has not been pushed to your Office version yet. Please be patient and wait for the development team to release an update.
Something about the way Microsoft writes just rubs me the wrong way.
Not: "Please wait for ... an update"
But: "Please be patient and wait for ... an update"
It's not just their staff here, it's all over the docs and UI too. They can't write two sentences without saying something condescending and rude.
Like in Word, if you look for how to turn off grammar checking, they'll tell you, but they just have to add "Remember to run spell check. Spelling and grammar errors can seriously undermine what you're trying to say, especially when your boss, your teacher, or that person in HR sees them." [1]
Because _everyone hated it_. Now, it seems that everyone also hates copilot, but there is no point pre-dooming it by bringing the dread paperclip back from hell.
I'll start on a slight tangent, but it may well be the solution to your problem.
Earlier this month I received a price increase email from Microsoft for Office 365 - to the tune of a 46% increase.
Not too keen on this I went to their website to check to see if there was a cheaper plan, and it turns out there is. You can "downgrade" to a Copilot-free version of Office 365, and this also does away with that absurd 46% increase.
So you get to remove Copilot -and- dodge another year of price increases.
Mini edit: Microsoft have started rolling out a "Turn off Copilot" options in the settings, I have it now in Word, but not in Powerpoint or Excel.
The MacOS copilot implementation is horrid. Takes up a significant amount of screen space just to offer a summary of the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever reason cannot be a simple button with pop up on click. It’s horrid.
> Takes up a significant amount of screen space just to offer a summary of the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever reason cannot be a simple button with pop up on click.
Because someone had 'Achieve Copilot feature adoption and utilization > 80%' on their VP level OKRs?
Would not put it pass them but truly the macOS office suite is in such disarray that I suspect it’s more mundane that they don’t have any real PMs. Surprising because you would think it would be worth at least some effort.
To this day Excel still does not have ribbon shortcuts so for any excel pros, it’s garbage. I have to run excel in a windows emulated environment.
I hope it does not involve typing on a keyboard. Typing on a keyboard is so millennial, and holds back innovation, such as everybody solely using touchscreens in closed walled gardens. I hope the future is an llm that has access to all the context of our lives and then presents 4-5 such different keywords, and you just tap on the ones you want to use for the email. Once the llm is sufficiently trained, the last step can even be skipped and lead to the most seamless and obstruction-free email user experience possible.
Typing is a powerful mental exercise, with each keystroke contributing to improved memory, language development, cognitive adaptability, and concentration – all of which essentially breeds innovation.
The future you described is a wild kind of dystopia.
Mental exercise sounds exhausting and pointless. Think of all the possibilities that getting rid of such unnecessary distractions would open to the users, such as more time for scrolling down in social media and watching ads.
I've written some super long emails; but I also include a TL;DR summary at the top when I do. Sometimes, the "how to get to the summary from the current, commonly known info" (long) part is useful; but not for everyone. And certainly not right out of the gate.
That being said, I'd almost never trust an AI to generate the summary part.
I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I don’t need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign. I don’t need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.
Actually the OP specifically said “grammar” checker, which since they can write is likely an intentional distinction. Alternate phrasings reveal the absurd elitism of the statement.
“I don’t need a spellchecker because I can spell.”
“I don’t need a calculator because I can do math.”
I don’t know by what mechanism, so it may only be possible with an enterprise license or through device management. But I know it’s possible because I’m on the email thread where someone sought guidance from management and the directive was affirmed to block it on Macs in our fleet.
For those trying to work out an alternative, I've found OnlyOffice desktop to be pretty good – it's quite similar to the Microsoft products, and fully compatible, but free.
I'm on Word on a Mac, and I do not see Copilot at all.
What have I done to banish it?
(I'm with you. I actually don't mind Word and Excel, on either platform, because they're good. Excel is pretty great, tbh. But the ongoing goofiness of MSFT is definitely making me look at alternatives more than i used to.)
*EDIT* It appears my refusal to allow AutoUpdate to run at will has saved me? I'm on Word for Mac 16.8.
LibreOffice is probably about 10% of the size of MS Office these days...
As for instructions/support: Changes between subsequent versions are minor. There was a versioning scheme change recently, so you may be thinking "Oh, LibreOffice 7.3 vs 24.8, very different" - no, mostly the same thing, it's just that 24.8 came out in 2024, in August. Also, there is ask.libreoffice.org #libreoffice on irc.libera.chat , and there are Telegram and Matrix channels... so just ask.
But it's true that with 0.1%-0.5% or so of the budget MS Office gets, it's difficult to keep all of the materials fully up-to-date.
Don’t forget I was replying to a person who is using Office 2003 and not paying as they probably paid their once 20 years ago for license and also don’t have any new features.
Last time I tried it (maybe 20 years ago?) there were fidelity issues (documents didn't display exactly identical to authentic Word), and some differences in minor features.
I should probably give it another whirl, although I'm really happy with 2003.
The fidelity issues are still there if you are loading Microsoft formats into LO. All the Microsoft format specificions are a insanely long, complex messes that even Microsoft doesn't follow, so I suspect that will always be so. But Office now read/writes ODF files, so you can ask it to convert into something LO is the authority on. That also means you can send an office user an ODF file, and expect it to be displayed sensibly.
So the friction is still there, but it's a lot less now.
Surprised they didn't Adobe that yet. Or maybe they already have, but it will only really affect enterprise who has actual money to go after.
Slightly surprised it still works on Windows 11. I'd be surprised if it had 64-bit support. I guess thst speaks to their commitment to backwards compatibility.
If you throw word behind a firewall with something like little snitch, does copilot disappear? There is probably zero reason word, excel, or powerpoint should need to connect to the internet.
IIRC, excel’s ability to run Python is entirely cloud based, even in the desktop apps. There is, of course, probably zero reason why that would need to be the case either :/
I’m dating myself but it reminds me of when e-mail hit the mainstream and Microsoft jammed it into every product with no thought for how it would really be used. Like in Excel … every email address in your spreadsheet would open the email client when you clicked the cell. Gee what if I want to edit the value in this cell instead of email the person? We’ll make that possible if you hold shift (or something). It was terrible and this feels exactly the same. The purpose is not to give the user a helpful AI assistant it’s just to be able to say “we have AI”. That’s it.
Yeah, we have networked supercomputers in every pocket and on every desk. And word processors and spreadsheets have been around for decades---that use case is a solved problem.
I suppose we can be charitable to Microsoft and say they're trying to innovate, but these AI features lack a clear practical need that they're meeting. It feels more like Big Tech flopping around trying to make the next big thing happen, rather than actually going out into the real world and solving problems actual humans have.
Microsoft is trying to stay relevant and have an answer to Wall St analysis asking them questions about their AI strategy. They will delete AI tools and helpers as soon as the industry goes after another "big idea".
Also, they can now proudly proclaim they have 100M+ subscribers to their AI stuff so it's a huge success :P
I'm glad my web-only 365 (business basic without teams, can't use the family plan because I need a personal domain) just renewed for a year so they can't mess with mine.
This. It is backwards attempt to become "The AI" company. They have sole rights to use OpenAI's technology and the best they can come up with is a price markup to further piss off their customers.
> I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Why don't you install and use one of the last single purchase licensed version? Last time I checked they were still available.
Even worse is I get this stupid Copilot thing while typing, interrupting me every two seconds to "generate my text with copilot" instead of oh you know writing text in Word.
And when I try it out I get "We encountered a problem validating your Copilot
! license.
Learn more about Copilot licensing"
and it doesn't work.
No explanation. I pay for this Office shit (won't anymore now obviously).
AI is ruining everything either directly or indirectly. Congrats.
Don't think that's true because increasingly often their marketing is nothing like the actual product. Doesn't feel like any of them are working together internally.
I'm the opposite -- I use both Word and Pages and I much prefer the experience in Pages, especially the page layout. I find Word painful to work with by comparison and I avoid it as much as I can.
Honestly thinking it again after re-reading the article. This feels like not being hungry at all but someone comes, opens your mouth against your will and pushes you a high calorie burger, fries and soda through your larynx. You are going to eat it, like it or not (just to put it politely).
Maybe in terms of being a word processor (i.e. supporting all the layout and editing/proofing features that Word has.)
But if, as the GP says, you want a program to “just let you write” (with some "writing-phase" accoutrements like change-tracking, word count, a dynamic Table of Contents, and so forth) — and you want a pleasant experience while writing, that takes advantage of the acceleration of native OS UI elements to keep that writing as smooth and jank-free as possible... then I’d assume Pages would be the clear winner, no?
(That, or just TextEdit. Though I’m not sure if TextEdit is optimized for novel-length texts the way word processors would tend to be.)
The issue with nearly all of these software suites is compatibility.
It is ironic, that libreoffice solves this the best, by being truly cross platform and not requiring special software to be purchased on the receiving end: yet it is the momentum of Microsoft Word that would instead hamper adoption of other word processors.
I am thinking about this, because the reason I would choose not to use Pages, is so that I can share my documents to other companies or even people in my company who may not have a Mac.
That's an excellent reason, to be sure. But here we're talking about an app to "just write", like opening a file and start pounding out an article or something. For someone who wants to do that, on a Mac, and who wants basic formatting and word-processory WYSIWYG-edness, I'd recommend Pages.
No idea how that’s true, there is nothing Pages does differently when it comes to opening a file and “just writing” that LibreOffice doesn’t do. If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are always being disingenuous when comparing the software in the first place.
> If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are ultimately being disingenuous
Disingenuous? More like realistic.
I mean this ultimately boils down to “is inconsistent with the design of the rest of the computing experience.” People who care about good, consistent design and can afford to pay for it are Apple’s core market.
Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5 of Pages. I’ll stick to the one that saves me time every time I open it.
Well, I didn't count before giving you those numbers. I gave you my feelings, which were way high. It's 1 second for Pages. Libre is too inconsistent to give a number.
It's the story of open-source on Mac. Projects will have an anemic userbase. After all, most Mac users wouldn't be caught dead with Temu MS Word. This means the apps have very poor performance on Mac. No one is filling bug reports.
I think it depends if you preload libreoffice at boot time or not. It makes sense if you are using it daily, not so much if you are using it once every other full moon.
It's not weird to be upset by a button which is entirely useless to the functionality of the product, and exists only to add politicization where there needs to be none. In fact, it's shameful that Microsoft did this.
Let's put it this way: if the button was for something you didn't agree with - say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of buttons in the preferences so it's weird to get mad about it"? I suspect not. I suspect that you would, in fact, be outraged even though that'd be an equally hidden expression of political opinions. We can't, with any fairness, take a stance that political expression is ok but only if it is for the ideas we agree with. So we should (and we used to) agree that things shouldn't have politics forcibly shoved in people's faces, and that we must live and let live. That's a far better way to coexist.
I don't know, the existence of that button seems like a great way to get the "empathy is a sin" folks to self-identify. I'll need that information moving forward because that's a massive red line in my religion.
> say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of buttons in the preferences so it's weird to get mad about it"?
if I was pretending that my dislike of a button for people to show their support for abolishing gay marriage was rooted in sincere concern for how much time was spent in porting the skin and menu button to another platform versus other more complex features, it would be absolutely right to observe I was being disingenuous in feigning neutral interest in feature prioritization decisions every time I called for it to be removed...
If you don't want the pride skin "shoved in your face", it's relatively easy not to visit the relevant area of the preferences menu and select it, just like people that aren't particularly interested in marriage or Christmas are welcome to refrain from using any of Office's wedding-related or Christmas-related templates
“it’s weird that you would pick that to get upset about” feels like the kind of spineless jab that I hear a lot from people with a certain political slant, which is fucking annoying because I have the same political slant, and you just make people dislike us with terrible takes like this.
Having checkboxes for fully cosmetic nothings while simultaneously releasing features that cannot be disabled feels strange given they are clearly able to put the required effort in for a hollow, mealy mouthed, capitalistic pandering effort.
Well, I'm on a Mac and it 100% has been implemented for me -- I tried to figure out how to turn it off as soon as I first saw it, went to preferences, found the checkbox. I didn't realize that hasn't been rolled out to everybody.
My problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.
Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...
Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of crap.
I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...
I don't like Teams, but personal preference aside, I hate how in most companies I've worked at, there's multiple communications channels. 365 should be a one stop solution for this, emails, calendars, meetings, files, and chat, but in practice a lot of IT organizations also use Slack alongside it. Where I work now there's a split between IT and the rest because the rest uses Teams while IT uses Slack, causing the barrier between the two to increase, especially since designers - who should work closely with development - are on the Teams side of the fence.
Fun fact if you want to change your office hours timezone to something other than the US default in Teams, you can't do it from Teams, you can't do it from Outlook, you can ONLY do it from the settings in the Outlook web app. Absolutely bizarre and broken situation
In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.
We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.
But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.
It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with it.
Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)
Rereading that makes me shake my head. Things didn't get that bad overnight. The fact that so many UX crimes were allowed to fester is proof that Microsoft doesn't care about or understand UX.
That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.
That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.
You aren't wrong - however GP didn't use the terms "Teams" and "SharePoint". Those terms should never be used next to "understandable" unless properly negated or followed by "/s".
> that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot)
This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
Yep. I've been an Xbox player since 2002. Huge Halo fan. Thousands of hours on 3 different generations of Xbox. I still have my Halo 3 special edition helmet. I keep up with gaming news and listen to multiple gaming podcasts every week.
But even I can't reliably name the last two generations of Xbox without a pause. I always have to stop for a second and think it thru because the naming scheme is so abysmal.
But that's my lived experience. I play Xbox games with friends who are playing on an Xbox console, but I'm playing on my Windows-based Legion Go or my Windows PC on a desk at home or even cloud rendered through a web browser on a Linux box.
Xbox isn't just a single physical hardware device. Its a platform for playing games.
I do agree though, the naming patterns for their consoles has been absolutely atrocious. I consider myself somewhat of a gamer but if you just gave me the list of consoles there's absolutely a non-zero chance I'd fail at picking the rankings of performance and age.
And ActiveX before that. It literally just meant self-activating COM objects but came to include a scripting host, OLE, CDO, and a multimedia framework.
Well, Visual Basic .net is based on the .net framework, can't deny that. It's a very different language from the previous non-.net Visual Basic versions, so much that some people rather argue that "Visual Basic" is the problematic part of the name, not the ".net".
Though also interesting to note that the development team at the time didn't feel like it was substantially a different language and the first VB.NET compiler was Version 7.
It’s funny seeing the Stockholm syndrome in action (or plain old forgetting) with OneDrive being touted as being part of the products, whereas it was the beginning of the mess that is now Office.
> what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office)
I only assume you refer to the pre 2000 state of Office. Confusion started way befor AI.
And to me the OneDrive - was forced on my in the job - was never a properly usable product, allowing others think differently, but to me, its weird ways and failures (i.e. renaming files) are jus barriers to efficiency.
This hacker news post is refreshing but unexpected. When I’ve one googled reviews of one drive, i’ve usually found the top results are threads of IT folks raving about how great one drive is compared to shared drives.
I have always been puzzled by the threads since it’s a mess with a bad UI with bad default locations for the various programs.
That confused me too. Made me a little angry when I was looking for something in Documents. I went to Users\username\Documents and the data wasn't in that folder. Turns out Windows maintained two Documents folders. That one + OneDrive\Documents.
I had uninstalled OneDrive the first time I used this laptop. But that wasn't enough. I had to reinstall OneDrive. Turn off folder backups. Unlink the PC from OneDrive. Then uninstall it again. That fixed the two Documents folders problem. OneDrive\Documents went away and the contents put back into Users\username\Documents.
A fairly frustrating experience and wasted about an hour troubleshooting it.
Yes, and I was already struggling to understand what Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
First I've ever noticed this. I was little surprised it now has infinite tabs, did that come in with win11? I also noticed today that it has autocorrect, never noticed that before! I generally just use it as a clipboard for ascii text so it might be it's been like this forever.
this was one of my favorite uses as well, especially when copying something from Word. copying to Notepad before copying to a terminal has saved me from so much grief of debugging why something is acting other than expected
That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service.
My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't.
30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more important. The fact that no one stopped this or that shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how absolutely broken modern computing is.
I feel like there has to be some weird cultural problem at Microsoft where nobody wants to speak up about obviously bad ideas.
They destroyed the entire Xbox brand overnight and hampered any chance at recovery with a stupid confusing naming scheme... now it seems like they've learned nothing from that?
Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!
>Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
Seriously, I have an xbox one and couldn't tell you which model it is, even after looking at pictures of them. I know there is a newer better model out now that looks similar and has a similar name. If I wanted to spend the $600 or whatever to upgrade tomorrow, I wouldn't know which one to buy.
I worked at a company a couple years ago that was running on Active Directory, Outlook, and good old fashioned Windows and Microsoft Office licenses. They wanted to "modernize" and so I was to learn about Teams/M365/Azure/Entra/Copilot/etc, and report on some options for what licenses we could get and which products we could use. It was bananas how difficult it was for me to understand what their product offerings were, due to frequent name changes and multitude of overlapping products/licenses. It was my job to figure out what software we wanted to pay them for, and Microsoft made it as difficult as possible - what they actually wanted was for us to get on calls with their sales staff, so they could tell us what we should pay them for.
Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value.
Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.
Imagine killing the globally recognized Twitter brand for a single generic letter.
The common denominator is ego. Office may be a globally recognized brand, but it was defined by someone else, and the person making the decision needs to mark their territory.
That's okay because everyone just calls it twitter anyway. there will be kids on twitter, calling it twitter, who were never alive when it was still named twitter
I only just now noticed it changed in the US, which apparently happened in 2022. I remember seeing "Coca-Cola sin azúcar" and "Coca-Cola sans sucre" in foreign markets before, I feel like I saw that pre-2022. I don't recall ever seeing a "Coca-Cola cero", for instance. Kind of feels like it was more aligning the brands internationally but maybe I'm just misremembering.
Literally everyone I know calls it "Coke Zero" - in fact, the "Zero" pattern has spread to the various soda companies to reflect the particular style of zero sugar.
I'm a shareholder and I have a problem with it. It's a bad focus and product strategy over-dosing on AI hype which I think will hurt them in the future.
As a user of Teams on Windows, I was so glad to find out I can map each Channel's files to a folder on my computer and edit files using LibreOffice rather than the "will it load?" crapshoot of using the web version Office that runs inside the Teams app.
I only started using MS cloud stuff last year. This whole Onedrive/SharePoint split confuses the hell out of me.
I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.
Sharepoint is like a big umbrella intranet/collaboration enterprise product. It's old, has a million sub-products, is heavily customizable, and is not really intended for normal users to actively do too much with beyond swap files. Onedrive is just microsoft branded dropbox or google drive. Since it's more focused and is a consumer-facing product, not really surprising that users prefer it. While I wouldn't call sharepoint deprecated per se, MS will probably continue to encourage larger and larger companies to just work out of onedrive.
Hey, be proud. The executive who pitched this gets a second mansion! Everyone wins, right?
Nothing will change until there's actual skin in the game for leadership. Leadership screws up and at worst they get some 7 figure exit package and still have no issues finding a job.
I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."
- Steve Jobs. 1996
I guess some things never truly change. And thst kind of" culture" is how you amass a cult following (it's in the word, "cult" ure).
Outside of early Xbox I can't think of many counterexamples to this.
Well, that's not quite fair. NT is a very interesting and definitely original kernel design, for example; NTFS is a file system with unique properties, and AJAX was an API devised at Microsoft (that one absolutely lacks taste, but at least it's an original idea).
That being said, I agree that the company and the brand evoke nothing but negative emotions in me, and I don't know anyone that would have anything better than "meh" on them.
It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago.
Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus.
Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance.
Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.
Would you mind writing down some of the exciting new Excel features? I am asking as an Excel user that 5 years ago used to love this tool (so much so that I would have paid for Excel if my employers did not provide it for free). Excel 2010 was peak Excel for me.
PS. Nobody I know uses Excel's Turing-complete Lambda-calculus. None of my former colleagues in Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Investor Relations, FP&A use it.
XLOOKUP, XMATCH, dynamic arrays and related functions. There are also new regex functions, but it seems that those didn’t make the cut for Excel 2024, unfortunately. I had situations in the past where lambdas would have been handy.
Teams has popup ads inside the app itself. No, I don't give a bloody damn about whatever stupid new feature you're trying to force upon me when I'm in the middle of a deep conversation with a coworker.
I was trying to join a meeting in Teams from the calendar when up popped a “How are you enjoying Calendar” star rating dialog. I’ve never once listed “Office Calendars” amongst things that I enjoy. Much less now with this needy feedback blocking me from entering the meeting.
Do you suspect that their plan to use Windows 11 to force everybody onto hardware with a TPM is the result of:
> no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing
Based on their increasingly user-hostile decisions up to this point (re: tricking people into using edge, ads in the start menu, etc) it's pretty clear that the name of the game is to monetize their privileged position as OS vendor by selling their users out to the highest bidder.
I expect they want TPMs everywhere so that they can abuse the passkey protocol's "attestation statement" to include attestations to advertisers about the user themselves, rather than about the auth circumstances (which is what that field is for). Being able to expose details about the human on the other side of an otherwise anonymous browser session is big money for advertisers, and if everybody has a TPM Microsoft can cryptographically exclude competitors from that channel (they no longer have to care if you're using chrome instead of edge). As for the AI everywhere, that's how they'll get to know you so that there's something to sell.
They've got a lot of thought going into their product, it's just that none of that thought is for the benefit of their users. Which is why I heartily disagree with:
> I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft
They used to make relatively good desktop OS and Office software with a consistent UI/UX - Windows 2000/XP/7, Office 97/2000 (if you disable Clippy). Then IMHO it went downhill first slowly and now faster. May be people are still attached to the platform they used for years.
I wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have to assert their dominance by making a change just for the sake of making a change.
I think when a company loses their founder, vision and leadership just aren't the same.
apple is also getting watered down. I don't think they've really come out with anything truly novel after sj passed away. In comparison to the ipod or iphone or ipad, the apple watch, vision, apple pay don't seem groundbreaking.
It does seem like their mainstream products are as tastelessly managed as ever.
But in the (small?) corner of developer products they've been pretty good: Typescript, VSCode, .NET/C#/F#, LSP, Lean are all great and very influential contributions.
I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages and somehow it has become completely unfit for purpose. Two series of data, one table of 300 cells containing one automatically extrapolated formula that multiplies the value of the cells in the series. A trivial spreadsheet use case that was solved 40 years ago. Changed the values in one series, and the table just... didn't update. Clicked into the cells and the formulas are right, they're referring to the right cells, it just doesn't update. I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?! How is such a fundamental feature of the spreadsheet so utterly broken?? You expect me to go and manually verify that all dependent cells have updated every time I change anything anywhere? Microsoft, you have failed at your most fundamental purpose, zero points awarded.
So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft right now.
The irony is something like 99.999% of spreadsheets in use today have zero calculations. People think of Excel primarily as a way to lay out text on two axes. It's mind-blowing but I see people write out a series of expenditures down a single column and then pull out a desk calculator, add them up, and enter the sum at the bottom
There is a setting in excel that disables auto calculation. This is useful for people who are (ab)using excel with massive data sets and crazy calculations. It sounds like this setting may have been on
> I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages … I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?!
You sure that wasn’t an operator error? Sounds like a pretty basic feature to not have working.
Trust me, I assumed I did something wrong. 20 minutes of investigation later, I exhausted every other reasonable possibility other than that the software is simply broken. Fun fact, the key combo to manually recalculate all cells is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9. That fixed it, but I'll never, ever trust Excel for anything again.
The crazy part to me is that, with a family subscription, the new AI privileges are only available to the primary account holder and not the rest of my family. That’s nuts.
> For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, Copilot will be available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others.
Yeah but then at least allow one to manually enable things later if they so choose, but I guess the cost aspect of the AI goes too close to negative even after the second user.
I just downgraded my O365 subscription to remove Copilot. I went to (web version) my account settings, subscriptions, manage, and canceled my sub, which then gave me the option to select a Classic edition without Outlook. It's the same price, which is hilariously stupid, but maybe the worst part is that it doesn't deactivate Copilot until the next billing cycle. So, whether you can't use Copilot for security and privacy reasons or you recognize that it is one of the most cataclysmic software failures in human history--I'm serious, compared to other "AI" platforms, its utility is nonexistent, and that's without addressing other issues with "AI" as a category--you're stuck with it until the next billing cycle.
This is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family: It's time to consider switching to
--==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==--
because:
1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans.
2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac.
3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to tell anyone about you or share a copy of your private documents.
4. No logging into anything or managing licenses.
5. You can download and use it for free: www.libreoffice.org (and it's on Chocolatey and WinGet too I think, if you're in Windows-land) . But of course it helps a lot when people also donate.
7. It has good community support; and there are also options for paid support, training, transition and deployment if you're in a business or organization.
8. There are also written guides in several languages for those who like that format, and there are some video tutorials etc.
and finally:
9. It is managed by a democratically-run public foundation with members from across the world. There are no large companies or governments pulling the strings or calling the shots.
It does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.
Which Desktop environment are you looking at? The "UI kit" is different on different platforms (the idea is to use native widgets)
If you mean the fact that it's not ribbony, with a lot of unused empty space between widgets and with mobile-phone-like aesthetic - the rejection of that style is intentional. Microsoft went that way, and hurt usability; LibreOffice has not. Although some argue emphatically that it's the way to go in order to attract new users.
For those who like a more ribbon'y UI style - it's available as an option. On the menu, choose "View > User Interface..." TBH, that's not fully-developed and I don't like it much.
but if you have specific suggestions/rants - UI/UX discussions are always ongoing, albeit slowly given the immense size of the project and the amount of dialogs and UI/UX aspects to be considered and improved. Try the "LibreOffice Design" channel on Telegram for example.
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
We will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not.
Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on pretending otherwise for a few years.
No one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago.
The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever).
I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays.
Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.
Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically better at writing more essays. It’s supposed to train your ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound reasoning.
I sort of had that in my HS English classes more than 30 years ago. Every paper we ever wrote for my final two years was in class for one hour. Occasionally we would get a second class period to work on our papers but the teacher held them until the next class period.
I got really good at getting my thoughts down quickly and efficiently. My freshman English course in college nearly broke me however since we were required to revise our papers at least twice after getting feedback, even if the feedback as overwhelmingly positive. It was a skill I had never developed.
When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible.
If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway (if you're required to do something with it short summary, you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing way before the "AI" hype).
Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:
- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet
- read the summary
- write your paper
It would still take you hours.
Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.
You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.
> If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway
This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.
You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.
> Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
You're underselling how much easier the access is.
> If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.
A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.
Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
> Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system.
I must apologize, because my parent comment wasn't well thought out.
Rather than saying "wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place" (which wasn't logical, sadly, I got carried on an emotion) I should've said that it has a limit to its usefulness. It probably was a meaningful system back in the day, just not future-proof. So it eroded over time and isn't a reliable or fair system anymore, with questionable meaningfulness when it comes to the new reality.
> Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree on this, hard. It happens that I'm a person who holds a very unpopular opinion on this matter.
Online games that competed on things like manual dexterity were and still are fun, valuable and entertaining. But it's also true that they're based on a fundamentally flawed principle (the existence of a "perfect shot", if we're talking about aimbots) that simply won't stand the progress.
As someone who believes in transhumanism, I perceive things like aimbots or wallhacks as aids, similar to glasses, exo suits or thermal googles. And I believe that tools are always "good" (if that's applicable term) as the very humanity has foundations in tool invention and use. It's only the consequences of their application (which are heavily context-dependent) have different moral values depending on the outcome.
The world is inherently unfair because everyone is born and raised in different conditions, gaining different bodily and mental capabilities. I despise the idea of leveling everyone down below any arbitrarily "acceptable" capability ceiling of what they can do with their "bare hands, eyes and minds" - in my book, this goes against the idea of progress. I rather wish to see the very opposite. Put bluntly, I want every single gamer to have the best aimbot there is, and the game mechanics is changed to keep things still competitive, challenging, engaging and fun. Which means some games (or possibly even genres) are going to die, but - hey - we aren't playing 3x3 tic-tac-toe anymore either, even though we used to do so when we were little kids with limited brainpower.
Last, but not least, I strongly suspect that the aspect we all hate is not some "cheating" (I believe it's a misdirection) but rather griefing - such as playing against the opponents of drastically different capabilities, aka punching the babies.
Heck, I want to live in a world, where someone making a good bot is celebrated, not stigmatized. Playing against bots can be made fun, too. I loathe the current trends of the industry towards tightening things down, with all the rootkits, and people hating others for something like having a programmable mouse.
I recognize it could be a very naive worldview, but that's what I currently believe in.
And, uh, sorry for a probable off-topic. It just happened that your comment tickled one of my pet peeves :-)
Yeah, I think the existence of Reader's Digest makes your point for you. I remember the first time my dad explained that it was misnamed because it wasn't really for the readers. It was for the people who didn't want to read.
because learning to read and to write is learning to think, and if you're the only person with some autonomy while everyone else regurgitates the same AI slop that's going to give you a lot of opportunity.
Ever since the internet has been around it's been easy to outsource your work, it won't do anything for you in the long run.
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but I don't think AI will have such a bad impact on school tests. They'll just have to move back to oral exams.
I remember reading that Socrates was against writing. His argument was that books don't hold real knowledge because you can't interrogate team. Real knowledge exists only in a man's mind because he can make use of it and answer questions about. I don't quite agree but I do see some merit to the idea. For example, NASA couldn't fly to the moon again by building a Saturn V because even though they still have all the documentation, most of the people who knew how to make use of that documentation are dead or retired.
Hopefully its just a return to the in class bluebook essay. That is like a force multiplier in learning imo due to how much you need to prep to feel confident going into them.
We had child labor and it was horrible, if you only learn to work, and only learn through work then it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation by others. And an employer is highly motivated by capital to exploit you as much as possible.
Microsoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
Today, I noticed there was a new App on my Windows laptop at work, because the Apps section was highlighted. "That's weird," I thought "I don't _remember_ installing anything."
So, I expand "Apps", and I see an item named "Microsoft CoPilot 365". It absolutely did not occur to me that this was a rebranded/updated Office. I simply thought "Aww, man, Microsoft is at it again, raining some new crap on me that I never asked for." Without a moment's thought I right-clicked it and uninstalled. Only now as I read this thread I realize I may have accidentally uinstalled MS Office.
The sad part is that that name doesn't feel like that much of a stretch for Microsoft. I wouldn't put it past them to end up with two products called Copilot.
Simple as this statement is it is also underrated. When you seriously consider their various products and properties it truly is a shocker at how consistently awful they all are.
It's shockingly bad because of how they want it to behave. They don't want it to bullshit, they don't want it to say rowdy things, and they want it stay "on brand".
Well too bad. These things are all modeled after human beings... they're literally called large language models. Human beings bullshit, they say rowdy things, and they don't always stay on brand.
The only way to have an exceptional AI is you actually "raise" (train) it like you would a normal human being. That's being learned with the quality of Deepseek's models, although I think they're lying through their teeth about how much it cost to train it. It's in China's interest to bullshit on that metric, so they're bullshitting.
Granted, they're no strangers to pushing unwanted nonsense on people (remember the ribbon?) but even by their standards this does seem unusually extreme.
Coming next week, another 8 versions of Teams, all called Teams but with subtly different icons and you can only sign into one of them with your license tier
Is there a single big company out there that sanely has not decided to ride this "AI" wave? People being pushed stupid features that no one has ever needed nor asked for? It's Clippy's revenge and you can't get rid of it this time? Microsoft really deserves ton of prizes for ruining so many products.
They even had a very Microsoft style rollout for it, where a huge modal for the chat bot would pop up and cover most of the page every single time you went to the docs, with no way to disable it. I tried it out with a very simple database sorting question, and got a completely wrong answer. I don't think I've used it since.
What was hilarious to me was I tried using it to figure out a niche config. I couldn’t use it because my employer totally locks down permissions. Not going to request bot access any time soon.
It's even dumber than it seems at first glance; what people do has changed to the degree where besides a niche market segment of users with deep product knowledge and usage, most activities and work happens in much simpler shapes than a productivity suite is a good fit for. It's primarily tasks using surface level functionality.
This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition even worse.
The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space between emulating the physical world and processes that are mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical world is pretty much self-eliminating.
I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That split is not really apparent with the other many products in the Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook, planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change.
Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to spend a working day only hurts the product.
I tried using Copilot that is embedded into Azure. It couldn’t tell me the right instructions to complete something trivial like exporting a database. Instead, it sent me to an out of date documentation complete with old screenshots. When I asked for the up to date documentation, it refused. Then I asked “Why are all Microsoft products so crap?” and it told me I had violated the content policy and disappeared.
A day later it came back (the chat window embedded into Azure) but now every request generates an error.
I ended up using a combination of other AI, Google and blogs to find what I needed. Even with all the power of AI and all the money they’ve spent on it, Microsoft is still a joke. I wish I didn’t have to use it but it’s going to take time to get off Azure.
Microsoft making questionable decisions lately, the official RDP client on Mac was renamed to "Windows App" some weeks ago. It's hard to come up with a worse name, Windows App is what I name any software product that runs natively on Windows.
RIP all the helpdesk employees who have to explain this to end users
I'm not sure if it has to do with the UI redesign and renaming, but I don't feel the new app is as reliable as before. My RDP connections now fail all the time.
A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
When I worked in an office with my linux machine, Libre office worked for me. No issues really. I didn't do anything super complex, but it was nice to be able to open those file formats.
Though to be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter. its was that or the web version of office.
Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the compatibility issue is obviously massive
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.
It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
Heh! Maybe 14-15 years ago I got my small employer to start using OpenOffice. They couldn’t afford Office licenses for everyone, but it was super handy to give everyone a word processor.
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
> Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself.
It's cheap insurance against giving the people who are paying me to collaborate with them a bad experience.
I have used OnlyOffice for my collaborative writing needs the last year, and it has been great. They offer a free hosted version, everything is open source and it can be self-hosted.
I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.
I am not a power user by any means. In fact I use Word and Excel maybe no more than 5 times a year for both professional and personal use. Yet I quickly run into things that are not well supported in other word processor/spreadsheet applications and need to go back to Office.
Currently next to the send button in one of my Teams chats are the suggested responses: "I look forward to it", "Haha, no problem" and "Haha, I know".
I assume some sort of AI is involved, but I not sure who would ever want to say such things, and my great fear is that one day my motor skills will let me down and I click one of these inane buttons.
I've sent the suggestion (many times) that they put in an option to let me turn this off, but they obviously haven't got around to this one yet. So I don't think that we can expect the opt-out options suggested by the article any time soon.
If you're talking about the mobile app I turned those off as soon as they showed up in the settings (click on your profile picture) under [messaging -> show predictions].
Feels like madness to get rid of the Office brand, such a strong name and brand, like Twitter or iPhone. Office must be worth billions in brand recognition. Ingoring everything else, that alone feels like a mistake.
You don't need brand recognition when you have market capture. Microsoft can murder a small puppy every time you buy Office and send you a photo, and you will still pay them because what else will you do.
But what consequences will a really large company face for such a prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone is forced to pay for their new Gemini AI features even if they don’t want it.
The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit. They are achieving that, so for them this isn’t a disaster. They are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup ecosystem.
My point was that any deserving and more helpful product that is not from Microsoft or Google will not see any revenue because customers are already being forced to pay for Microsoft or Google’s AI products.
We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).
As far as I can tell, they didn’t do this price increase on the business/enterprise SKUs at all. Copilot is still an add on for any of the integration with Office.
(Something the UI reminds you of if you’re on a business plan without it, if you click the button it offers to request a license from your admin unless they remembered to turn that off.)
> The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit.
Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI" products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.
AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut up and buy MSFT
> Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division.
It's always this surprisingly mundane decision behind every fuckup.
Just pump up numbers this quarter, the evident crash in user confidence and subsequent revenues is the next sucker's problem.
Cancelled immediately after getting the email. I bought a pair of Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20 each for myself and my wife within the hour
These are from volume licenses. Not really legal but it mostly works in practice. In some cases the buyer gets unlucky and the volume key gets revoked due to too many activations, but either the seller will give you a replacement key, or it's just another few bucks for a new key.
What is a good way to check to ensure we are not being handed a key that will get revoked
Even in our markets, we have office licenses available on Amazon for all prices ...the cheapest ones looking very suspect but not so sure about the ones that cost a decent amount.
Might as well buy a used Office 2010 CD with the original key/packaging if you’re at it. The icons are all what’s changed since from a home user perspective.
I currently have a 365 Family plan, but have never used any of the family features. Wanted to downgrade to a 365 Personal Classic plan, but that option is not available. Spent an hour waiting for Microsoft Support to help. Nice gentleman on the other side of the chat window directed me to Business Sales and closed the chat.
I can't really fully understand what "Microsoft 365" stands for. Microsoft years in day? Microsoft all year? hard to understand. Sounds like some kind of new super-term for their Office products. In that case, LibreOffice works absolutely fine inside my company. Element works alright for secure e2ee messaging. For storage and document collaboration we are using a self-hosted Nextcloud cluster. All of these solutions are free and have no upfront fee, but they have some maintenance costs of course, yet I think they are magnitudes lower that M$ could scam us for. The AI tooling you can definitely integrate in the workflow yourself if you need them (we don't). As non-us company inside security field, we have little trust towards microsoft to store the sensitive data on their cloud services, and generally the amount of measures taken against corporate espionage is higher – communications are taken through verified and trusted e2ee mediums, and it's common to host enterprise infrastructure on-premises – it's totally realistic to have your company data and communications never leave your virtual private network, and it's a good practice to do so in my opinion.
… except that Google took this as permission to make their previously optional AI bolt-on mandatory and hiked the price for every user in exactly the same way.
Complaining to their support was an utterly miserable fruitless exercise that has me wondering what alternatives there are to this madness for SMEs…
One of the problems I see with the 365 suite, is that most users’ ratio of consume:produce is pretty high. IOW, they use it to view the content authored on it. They might author the occasional document, but they’ll view +10x that many. This makes a one size fits all pricing difficult.
It is an interesting data point that two large companies (MSFT and AAPL) have both failed to properly implement AI tooling within their ecosystem. In MSFT case it is such a terrible experience as a end user, especially in MacOS. I don't even think its an issue with the LLM themself or the engineering talent but a complete lack of talent at the product level. I have never used the capabilities they have built (they are bad implementations) and on top of that the UI is so in your face that it is pathetic. In MacOS Outlook they have a quarter inch sized bar in the main UI with just a button to summarize. It is so bad.
Pushing undesirable features and products on users like that always ends badly. Pushing AI onto users that use those products for legally protected data is a supremely bad idea. I'll be surprised if they don't get sued.
Meanwhile, I got a spam popup about Gemini when logging into a google workspace. I found the button to activate it in the workspace chat and it told me "Gemini in chat is not available".
There are a bunch of education users that are really pissed off because they don't want kids learning to read and write to be "assisted" by badly implemented AI "features".
But there's (AFAIK) no GPO to turn Copilot off in the apps.
An interesting note on the making a PowerPoint out of a folder of pictures. That isn't a task. It's a few non-obvious button clicks but it'll just make each slide a picture. Used to use it for my grandfather's travels. Just in case anyone thought they needed a LAM or whatever for that.
For those just skimming the article and who haven't heard, as an existing subscriber to Microsoft 365, you can switch to the Classic variant without AI and without the price increase, by clicking on "Cancel subscription" on your account page and selecting Classic.
This doesn't even work well. It was still listing the old price for my renewal on Feb 1, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't billed more, so I clicked on "Cancel subscription", and didn't see any option for Classic, so I clicked the "I don't want my subscription" button, figuring that the option was behind that... and it cancelled my entire subscription. Resubscribing then only gave me the option to subscribe at the new +30% price rate.
Had to spend two hours with MS support to get them to cancel my subscription again and actually get me onto the Classic plan. I lost two weeks of my plan that I'd previously paid for, without recompense, and they warned that the Classic plan was a one-time transition thing, so by that measure I'm also out an entire year of the Classic plan compared to if I'd renewed at the old rate on Feb 1, 2025, and then switched to my year of Classic for my Feb 1, 2026 renewal. Also kicked my entire family of their shared plans so had to re-invite and subscribe them all.
I don't even care about the Office apps, all I really care about is OneDrive, but there aren't any great alternatives for that... e.g. Dropbox Family is nearly double the price of 365 Family.
Upvoted because it's an actually helpful comment -- I've just downgraded mine to classic. I dont need to pay for several AI subscriptions -- they all do the same thing.
Based on the fact of them using a dark pattern to hide a subscription tier, and effectively hiding the one that they're claiming to no longer exist hence the price increase would have me cancel out of principle.
Dear Microsoft, if you try to force it on me, I am not going to use it. In fact, I will ignore it altogether. The same goes for any of the features in Windows that are turned on without my permission.
The AI assistant for Office 365 is confusing, e.g., the "light bulb" feature in meetings/calendars adds random OneDrive references. This can be dangerous, as it might be mistaken for attached documents, leading to misunderstandings between the people in the meeting. Such features should be OFF by default and enabled selectively, allowing users granular control over their impact.
The author touched on the multiple accounts problem in the article.
I don't use MS products but some of my clients do and when I get an account on their system, it's always been a hassle to set things up. It remembers old accounts which i can't delete, Random error 500s, Teams doesn't work in the browser, and several paper cuts which has made me dread the idea of logging in into any MS account.
I have not used Office for years, but I still can't imagine using anything else to write a document if I ever need to.
Serious question: what is the last version of Office (or Office for Mac) that I can purchase that doesn't include AI features? Are there 202x versions still available that will never be updated with AI features?
It might be the last piece of Microsoft software I purchase for a good decade.
Good point: I still cannot use CoPilot. I frequently try to figure out if MS365 Business accounts in the US have copilot yet. I used it for my family account and dont see any availability to use Copilot in that software either.
I subscribed for a trial month because I had a lengthy word document which was bilingual in a side by side table. I wanted it to fill maybe 20 trivial items which needed to be put in several obvious places.
Oh boy! It couldn't do anything except append to the end of the document. It couldn't create tables! It couldn't search and replace! It couldn't maintain formatting.
Very tired of the popular “productivity” suites, I moved my entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as you can imagine) and now they’re springing Gemini on us, which is less terrible, but we’ll be paying for the pleasure.
I was pleasantly surprised how well WSL works under Windows 10. Unfortunately, it is also considered a security threat, because corporations don't like users having effective root on their machines.
>Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division.
When Microsoft decided to advance straight to Windows 10 from 8, it also necessitated skipping the 2015 fiscal year. They have been stuck a year in the future ever since.
And yet you'll have a ton of people tell you everything since 2007 has just been terrible and completely unusable and unfit for purpose. Others will tell you Office 2003 was massively bloated and used way more RAM than necessary and had way too slow startup times.
On an alternative opinion maybe, Microsoft seems to have survived so many such "disasters", that one start to question maybe they are not as disastrous as they are portrayed to be?
Putting Microsoft completely apart, what make you think that there is strong correlation between survival span and the amount of disaster that some human organization can engender?
How has MS broken any of Australia's competition laws/regulations here? They put up the price on their product and (theoretically) "added value" to justify it.
They didn't/don't have to offer "Classic" but they do. They make you jump through hoops to get it. That's not stuff that ACCC will do something about.
They should have made it something we wanted. Crazy thing is a year ago I wanted to pay for it but I had to have a business plan and pay annual instead of monthly. They really missed an opportunity there because I would have paid.
Sublime Text and VS Code both do the same thing. I can imagine that it takes a bit to get used to, assuming that you'd even want to, but I've found it to be very handy: At this point in time 6 unsaved text documents open in Sublime Text, covering a variety of subjects that I haven't quite finished working on, or that I just want to remember for later
How so? None of this would more than mildly inconvenience me if it were lost. Important notes/files are of course saved in appropriate locations, but a lot things aren't that important
The default editor in Ubuntu, presumably just the default gnome text editor, is the same. I struggled to get rid of a scratchpad of notes once. Really weird and unexpected and I'm sure it gets people in trouble occasionally.
I do the same in Sublime and VScode. I believe both ask you to save when exiting, but in a forced exit or reboot both restore the complete session including unsaved files and unsaved edits.
My work laptop as 64 gigs of RAM and the latest processor. It is admittedly the most high-spec work laptop I have ever used. Unfortunately it has Windows 11, which means it runs slower than a crappy Windows XP laptop from 2005.
Surprisingly, I’ve figured my Windows 2000 ThinkPad with Word 2000 does 90% of what I need (apart from docx and live sharing) and does it noticably faster than my Windows 11 ThinkPad with Word 2024.
It's not that long ago that there was all the hullabaloo about Notepad being updated for the first time in years, to support Unix line endings. Now it has been replaced wholesale with a slow app that crashes.
Even more basic than that, it has some bizarre behavior regarding selections: pressing Shift+End selects to the end of line including the EOL, such that pressing Backspace will then splice the line. No other text editor I've used does this, and it's annoying.
How do they still have money?
Their primo offerings can be readily substituted with FOSS since decades, and at this point the libreoffice experience is better.
1. The effect of being the closest-to-reach solution on MS Windows.
2. Organizational inertia.
3. MS Office' use of OOXML is convoluted and difficult to replicate/reverse engineer, making it difficult to perfectly export to and import from it.
4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt about ditching MS Office. Nobody ever got fired for paying for Microsoft Office.
5. MS marketing
Ai is new and this justified them to move fast and break things, including user privacy. The amount of money they target to make minus the slap on the wrist will still be a monumental profit. Then they'll try to clean up house and play PR theater.
Google also did something like this to people with Business Standard Workspace licenses (i.e. the ones who signed up for Google for Domains and got bamboozled into an enterprise offering that limited Google functionality quite noticeably...but that's a topic for another post).
Two weeks ago, we were notified that our accounts had licenses Gemini for Enterprise enabled by default, at no extra cost. With that change came an absolute walloping of AI nudges in Gmail, Calendar and Drive apps.
The only way to turn it off was to contact support so they could enable two hidden checkboxes in the Admin panel that turn off Gemini for good.
Note that any users in a Google Workspace tenant can still enable Gemini outside of the org somehow. Upgrading to Enterprise licenses _might_ prevent this "feature."
I don't even know what Copilot is anymore. Typical Microsoft bullshit.
It started off as an MS copy of ChatGPT which was really good, especially as ChatGPT bans Hong Kong because China boo boo bad and all that dumb shit.
But now suddenly it's an AI version of Siri, giving short responses to questions. Why? I stopped bothering with it
Once again, a huge tech company trying to make its users want a feature they don't need because management decided it's the buzzword 'strategic priority' they need to sell.
I mean, the ONE thing I want is when I am writing an email to coordinate a meeting and it says "how about tomorrow at 1:00" in the email body, that I can reply with a meeting and the time is set for tomorrow at 1:00 automatically?
Surely we can do this MSFT???? The most basic AI help please, thank you.
When CoPilot showed up in my Word, I was writing a pitch doc that asked me to also describe whether I was using GenAI for anything for this pitch. It made me realize I didn’t know whether this doc was getting auto-pushed to CoPilot and would be used for training in some way. Dislike.
Microsoft is evidentially bad at all forms of naming -- I have it on good authority that even (some) of their sales people think so (and will discretely admit to it).
They've fixed their CMD app. 5 years ago, to enlarge the window, you had to tweak how many rows/columns you want to show, tweak with those until you have the desired window size. Now you can just resize like you would on any other app
Compared to 9x? Sure, but it’s not like it was born in a vacuum. Compared to NT 4? Not really, I think. There were significant new things (MMC, Windows Installer, a first-party USB stack). I think there was a grand total of one headline new feature for developers (COM+, a continuation of MTS, a non-partition-tolerant distributed transactions thing). It’s not nothing, surely, but I don’t really see anything that deserves being called “revolutionary”.
As an oldtimer, when Redhat 9 came out at the same time as Windows 2000, Windows 2000 was ridiculously far ahead. Many engineers switched back to Linux from Windows for a while.
Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off.
I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Not only did the megacorp CEO's drop the ball on AI... we've got them gloating over widespread firing of engineers due to AI and then quotes like "I'm good for my $80B" like its his own personal money bag. And now they're force feeding crappy alpha AI products. The egos are well out of hand. And they give this group the name "The Magnificent Seven". WTF have we become. We trust these companies to be stewards of AGI/ASI?
So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol.
I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" so it doesn't surprise me that 365 went the same way.
I'm saying this and I'm a person that's usually extremely enthusiastic about new tech, but I'm just burnt out on these companies trying to shove AI down our throats.
Had it been opt-in and gradual, I would be far more optimistic and enthusiastic. I guess my question is "why such a rush?". Even Apple rushed into it with something half-baked and unfinished.
> So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol.
The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.
Exactly zero management or executive positions at my workplace have had the “can an AI do this?” exercise intended to explore ways of reducing headcount.
CEO is the one job role that AI can’t take because AI lacks accountability. Who is the person using the AI that will get blamed by the board if they screw up? That’s the CEO, even if you decide to give them a different title.
CEOs also lack real accountability though. Every time something goes really wrong they claim that they have no responsibility because people below them caused the problems.
How the F do you square that circle? If you're at the top you either are responsible or you aren't.
That applies to many roles. Lawyer AI can’t actually lawyer because someone needs to be accountable. War fighting AI needs to know where to kill. Doctor AI needs handholding. If we can find a legal construct for an AI surgeon operating on your child I think we can find one for an agent running a marketing company working on shareholders behalf.
> Who is the person using the AI that will get blamed by the board if they screw up?
The AI will get blamed and they can switch from OpenAI to Claude to something else.
Yeah, the accountability argument doesn't make sense to me from a practical viewpoint. The benefit of accountability is that it provides a path to avoiding repeated errors. There are other ways to achieve this using software tools.
You can get a pretty good accountant for $100k I think. They could vet the AI decisions and take responsibility.
I've been saying for a long time that the real definition of 'personhood' is the ability to take liability. If something can be sued in court (not counting civil forfeiture sophistry) then it counts as a person.
How about "If it gets sentenced to prison time" instead because corporations routinely get sued in court only to be charged a small percentage of the profit they make through criminal activity and that isn't "liability" it's just paying the justice system a cut of the action as a cost of doing business.
What accountability does Elon Reeve Musk, richest grifter on the planet and CEO of half a dozen companies ever face? An AI can be turned off and replaced at any time.
CEOs are replaceable by a bag of D20s. Let's not waste the watts on a LLM.
> The real story nobody is saying out loud is that CEOs are much more replaceable by AI than are software engineers.
Sorry, but that’s not true at all. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Who is replacing the CEO of a company with AI? The board? The board doesn’t want/can’t run the company. They will hire someone to “run the CEO AI”? Won’t that just be a CEO using AI? Maybe that makes it so the CEO is paid less Because now they just run OpenCEOv4? I don’t see it happening though. Also a very large portion of the day to day of CEO level execs at those big companies interpersonal and/or performative. You won’t be replacing that with AI anytime soon. You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Lets say that CEOs are no more or less replaceable with AI than all the other jobs.
Throwing away all the humans to replace them with AIs is a move only an AI CEO would make, because and AI couldn't give less of a shit if something it does blows up in its face. Well, apparently real CEOs couldn't care less either. Imagining you're going to run a successful software organization (once you've hollowed out the people who both understand the work and actually give a shit about it) is insane. These people know that it will blow up, but they hope that it is only after they can rake in their bonus pay for the mounds of short term profits that result form layoffs, after which they'll float away under their golden parachutes leaving their former companies to collapse under the weight of institutionalized incompetence.
Yes, I agree with the picture you're painting here, but it befuddles me where all these grifters think they'll go?
They'll have to live in bunkers for the rest of their lives.
Imagine that you're one of them, and you want to go watch a game (or a T. Swift concert) -- so you hop on your private jet and go to the stadium/arena. If you happen to be caught on-camera and your face is up there, on the Jumbotron, every single person there is gonna boo you. That's what your life will be like. What's the point?
They'll just fly Taylor in for a private concert. Everybody has a price.
You are right, and you made me sadder. Have an upboat.
> You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Wasn't that the whole point of AI generated images / video?
No? That makes no sense.
Flip the script. The CEO AI runs the company. No one runs the CEO AI.
> You still need a face of it at the end of the day.
Feel like that one's solved with 30 seconds on DALL-E
again, that also makes no sense. If AI reaches that level of competence, then why would it only replace the CEO position or be better at being a CEO than say a people's manager? an engineer, HR, legal, sales, marketing etc? In fact, why not just create an "All AI company". you just register it, and run OpenCompanyAI, feed it some parameters "You are a company selling
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibilities; CEO is just what the conversation was focused on.
This just isn't true unfortunately, but the angle of attack that is true is AI replacing the need for the rest of the company for you to be able to make money as an individual.
>I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do"
My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".
That and the fact that it will brick my $600 HP Reverb G2 headset are two reasons that I will never ever “upgrade” to Win11.
Microsoft not the only one.Mac OS upgrades effectively brick their own hardware. I’ve got a beautiful 27 inch iMac with a retina screen 5k … unusable now on last 2 OS updates.
Unusable? I still use my 27” 2011 iMac. Other than performing like a 14-year-old computer, it still does everything it ever could.
Except develop apps for the Apple platform. Or use any of the new features of the Apple macOS. Or soon receive any security updates.
Well, unless you use LegacyPatcher of course.
Cool project. Thanks for posting. I may look into it to breathe life into my beautiful old iMac.
Are you using it for your old macs?
Of course, it’s not perfect but what is.
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/releases...
“As to be expected, macOS Sequoia support is still in active development. This is a community-driven project, and as such we ask users to keep expectations in check and use older OSes if you encounter issues that affect you.”
Easier to implement ads on it if you can't move it.
It's possible to do it using [ExplorerPatcher] I think, but it's not officially supported.
[ExplorerPatcher]: https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
really we are that low now ?
This seems extremely niche. Maybe even petty? Why do you care where the taskbar is? Remember that every change breaks someone's workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/
It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+, why on earth would they remove it? I've had mine aligned to the top of the screen for as long as I can remember, and there's even 3rd party tools that restore this basic ass behavior in Win11 (not that I'll ever use that bloatware willingly again). M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.
> It's been a feature of Windows for a decade+
It was in Windows 95! AT LAUNCH!
It was there 3 (three) decades ago.
But can you explain why this feature is/was so important? The fact that there are 3rd party tools that can restore it makes it even more marginal. There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use, it seems strange that this very marginal one should get someone up in arms.
> M$ has no excuse, other than them being a completely incompetent entity of course.
No, it's because "M$" doesn't think it's an important feature. There's no incompetence. Do you actually believe what you said?
Is this some form of OCD or hypersensitivity? Because I struggle to understand the type of mind that cares at all about this. And how do such people go through life, especially working in software, where things change constantly?
Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day? Should we disallow changing background images? Should we let people set color accents as they can right now? Should we even let them choose where they want their desktop icons to be, or which desktop icons they can have there? Or should we disable choosing which applications can be locked in the taskbar? Are all of these equally incomprehensible as the choice of where the giant-ass taskbar that permanently fills up a non-negligible percentage of your screen real estate sits to you?
Would you also defend any of the above?
Also, this has been a feature since the XP days, people have built muscle memories around it, and then for literally no reason M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them and restore this basic functionality that has been there forever.
> There are gazillions of UI changes in every app we use
And this is a good thing to you somehow? I don't want my OS switching up on me at random every day of the week, I want to login the next day and have everything be where I last placed it, not have some troglodyte PM at M$ trying to suckle on the promotional teet decide where my icons go for me.
> "M$"
Are you perhaps one of the aforementioned troglodyte PMs over there? I've noticed that M$ employees get pretty bothered about that little dollar sign in the name.
I don't work as a PM or for Microsoft.
Perhaps the problem is a deeper one, which is constant and likely unnecessary UI makeovers. But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto:
> Do you actually not understand why customization is something people want out of the operating system they use for upwards of 8+ hours a day, every single day?
All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
> M$ decides to remove it, requiring 3rd party devs to do their job for them
But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
> But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for. More to the point, onto
For me it's personally not, it's mostly about how slow and bloated W11 feels. On my 9800X3D (an insanely powerful and fast chip!), explorer is slower than it was in the windows 95 days on the i386 of yore. They've converted half of everything in Windows into a web view and you can feel it, don't even get me started on the adware.
> All the examples you listed are much more significant IMO than whether the taskbar goes to the bottom or top of the screen. I imagine that MS would be less likely to remove those features.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree here, to me the taskbar is one of the most central parts of a modern OS next to file navigation and things like the start menu. It sits on your screen, visibly and permanently, and takes up a good chunk of your screen real estate. I know for many people they prefer it vertical because otherwise they have a kilometer-wide, mostly-empty taskbar taking up ~5-10% of the bottom of their screen. For me I keep it on the top of the screen because A) It's what I'm used to since the XP days and B) I find it easier to reach for than on the bottom, because my cursor is pretty much always on the top half of the screen rather than the bottom half.
> But why isn't that the end of the issue then? The feature can be fully restored.
You could make this same argument for basically every feature though, including the ones I listed. Why not remove background images and let it be handled by some 3rd party tool as well? It's about as basic as customization can get in an OS, so it should be handled natively by the OS. Not to mention that, due to it being 3rd party, it's also prone to breaking on Windows updates, and some applications rely on the OS to handle things like where to place the application window, and having things hack around OS-imposed limits like this does lead to weird behaviors and bugs.
It shouldn't require someone download 3rd party tools for functionality this basic, especially since it's already been in there since the basically the inception of the OS. Even MacOS lets you do the vertical taskbar/Dock, and that's the epitome of closed-down customization (not that Apple doesn't have similar problems, such as requiring 3rd party tools for external mice or window tiling via Rectangle).
> But among the endless blizzard of these, this is an odd one to make your last stand for.
Everyone has their own personal last straw.
Really the pettiness of spending effort to remove a feature for no good reason is the annoying thing here.
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> But can you explain why this feature is/was so important?
1) It's a line in the sand between decades of customization versus "my way or the highway [third party tools, some of which get banned for 'hacking' to implement their features, all of which are generally banned in things like corporate environments]".
2) It's a customization feature that has existed since Windows 95. Removing that feature broke decades of user habits.
3) At least one of the third-party tools has been briefly banned by Microsoft Defender for "hacking"/"reverse engineering" Windows. Most of them can be accused of that. The existence of third party tools today does not imply the continued existence of third party tools.
4) It's often compared to how Apple prefers a lack of configuration for "strong opinions". It's an especially funny comparison because Apple has almost always allowed you to move the macOS Dock to different screen edges.
5) It's a great waste of space on Widescreen monitors, and especially Ultrawide monitors. I've been using a right-hand side taskbar since square CRTs, because I felt even in 4:3 that horizontal real estate is at a much higher premium than vertical space. As a user of widescreens, including ultrawide, I especially feel like horizontal real estate is much useful to me as additional app space than vertical space.
6) Microsoft knows how much real estate is spent on a bottom taskbar. They know that's a valuable band of real estate. They've been selling selling ads on it, and assuming things like Copilot can go directly on it without user opt-in because they seem to feel they've got all the space they want and "own" that space. It's not the user's to own anymore.
It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases (myself included), and taking it away is a message that Windows belongs less to the users and User Customization is less important in today's Windows than yesterday's. It's emblematic of so many other problems in Windows 11. As a modest feature, it feels so much like a synecdoche, a part that resembles the whole, a part (of the problem) that represents the whole (problem).
> It's a marginal feature in the number of users that used it, but those that did use it, used it for decades in many cases
Not only that, but the users who did move the taskbar are more likely to be the "power users" who will help to evangelize Windows in an organization. Those are users who Microsoft should want to keep happy. When you lose them, you lose any sort of grassroots support in an org.
It's a small change in terms of code and number of users affected. It's a big change to the affected users and in user perceptions.
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Apparently, it isn't that rare, as I too used to place the taskbar at the top of the screen (I switched to Mac 10 years ago). I simply wanted the taskbar to be near the menu bar so I wouldn't have to move the mouse more than necessary - that was the first thing I customized when installing Windows.
Because they're used to it being in a different place?
Man I'm old. I've been using Windows since 98. I can't stand it when MS designers change shit.
Luckily I'm not the only one and there are many tools to pretty much keep Windows stuck in time.
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Calling someone petty for wanting to keep the workflow they're used to hardly seems good-faith to me.
Your question was not asked in good faith, it was a troll.
A comment like this tells me you are a child and ignorant.
Well, it is not software developers that won't be needed anymore. It is large corporations. If a small team of developers can make huge projects. There is no reason for them to work for a large business.
> you get pissed off as a software engineer lol
I think this part depends on the person. I've personally been programming since I was a kid making games for my TI-83+, and in all that time and fatigue have been the limiting factors in how much of what I wanted to build that I actually could build.
So something able to write code rigorously enough to replace SWEs would be an absolute dream! I love programming with all my heart, and it's the thing I've spent most of my life doing... but I feel in love with it because it could make things.
A way to make even more things at a greater scale I'm individually capable off is such a joyous idea that if anything, I get annoyed at the idea they'd tease that without knowing it's possible (of course, they're trying to raise so...)
The aspect of wanting to replace SWEs is completely ok with me and I think there should be a rush to see it through. Imagine if every researcher could have an army of top tier SWEs at their beck and call for example. Or even imagine learning to program alongside a personal world-class expert from day 1, after all the fact AI could do it wouldn't mean we couldn't still do it ourselves if we wanted to.
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Unlike the "AGI in 3 years crowd" I don't actually know that it's possible, but where I agree with them is that the route there is probably not going to be a slow burn. Most companies need to demonstrate some external value along the way or they won't be able to continue, hence the chasing down of usecases that they can ship today.
Unfortunately not all of us can raise $1B on a txt file and a promise not to release our product :)
I would guess that the pushback is more about the possible economic imbalance that will happen and less about being replaced on the actual effort of coding.
Maybe because I'm not originally from this country my view is different, but I think the fact the majority of the world's increase in population is about to happen in extremely poor places that will be subject to the worst of climate change means that the AI will have to be immensely powerful to actually increase worse imbalances than we're already headed for.
So powerful that it'd also raise the floor on quality of life for the 8 billion people on earth almost with ease, even if its owners stayed deeply profit/power motivated.
After all, it's not like the tech bros will get to make money by hoarding the AI and it's fruits after all. They need to apply to downstream tasks to actually cash in on its value. They could hoard the AI itself, but if OpenAI was suddenly able to break into every industry with a tireless AI army of top engineers and researchers they'd still be be producing real advancements for the world.
(and to be clear that's closer the worst timelines where AI advances so greatly. I think the more realistically we'd seem competition lead to something much closer to widespread advancements rather than some singular superpower emerging)
I am almost certainly wrong, and we will find some solution, or sue the hell out of the genAI firms, but this is the economic issue I see. It competes with productivity as a core economic driver of human wellbeing:
Concentration of wealth.
GenAI consumes content, even that created in low resource languages and regions, and spits it back out, separating the creator from the traffic due to their labor.
This isn’t entirely unknown - we’ve all been inspired by someone else stuff and copied our own.
Now, genAi firms have inserted themselves into this loop. And they’re cutting out the creator.
The scaled, automated pseudo workers that these firms promise, are owned by the firms. The productivity they create accrues to a small group of foreign multi nationals.
Economically - this shouldn’t be an issue. More productivity, means more capability of people doing newer work.
I do expect this to happen. However firms are also very good at making sure they capture the greater share of the market.
That researcher probably wouldn't have an army of SWEs at his or her disposal but be out of a job like the SWEs. If they get AI to a point where it can be a safe and competent senior SWE, it'll be able to fill a huge breadth of other roles as well. Human creativity isn't looking like quite the moat it was supposed to be.
Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work, possibly for good, nor are we in any way ready for the kind of power certain tech billionaires would have if their workforce were to scale with just the amount of hardware they own.
At this point I kind of hope the current breed of AIs will plateau quickly and stay there for a while so that maybe society can catch up instead of getting surprise bulldozed by a gaggle of tech giants.
Question I have is if no one has any job because it’s been replaced by AI, what happens to the economy?
essentially it would be the end of employment and return to feudalism
likely followed by either a French Revolution (if lucky) or a Russian Revolution (if not)
Of what use are the peasants in an AI driven and dominated feudal society, though. Maybe us peasants be useful in wars or battles between the different lords, but this would also probably be performed by automated drones and robots.
It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though. Who’s gonna buy their crap and for what reason will they they create anything? The whole thing seems like a massive doom spiral.
> It would seem that the Lord‘s will have nothing to Lord over though.
You have machines that can design and build mega-yachts, mansions, private space craft, ....
You can afford to purchase vast areas of land from people selling whatever they have to get by, ...
--
Asking what billionaires will do when they can't sell to the poor, is like asking why the human economy didn't crash ages ago because we have any off planet aliens to sell to.
Or how did we keep the economy going all this time, given the ants and trees couldn't afford anything we produce?
All an economy needs is someone with the means of production, who is able to get resources, and use those resources to produce something they want. I.e. you can have a working economy with just a single person. Or self-interested AI.
Hermits have an economy. Now imagine the hermit has trillions of dollars of resources and square miles of intelligent circuitry and robotic servants.
That hermit doesn't need the rest of us. Customers? Where we are going, we don't need customers.
Ok. I guess they have themselves to Lord over. I’d hardly call that an economy though.
https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
“The Solarians specialized in the construction of robots, which they exported to the other Spacer Worlds.”
Thanks for this, but Solarians have an economy that sells robots to other planets. Earth has no such luxury.
> Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work
Our societies were built before there was a technology that could replace its smartest people with machines that never tire?
I don't get why people keep trying to imagine current society + super-intelligent AI: by definition it won't be our current society if we can actually get there would it?
I mean if we have AI that can even replace the researchers (I wouldn't dream so boldly tbh), imagine how much faster the pace of scientific discovery becomes. Imagine how much more efficient we can make power generation and transmission, discover new treatments for disease, democratize learning at costs never before possible...
I don't love to spend too much time daydreaming what we could do down that because SWEs already feels like a bit of a pipedream, so all novel research being automated away is just completely in fantasy land... but realistically we're already on a pretty terrible trajectory otherwise.
Our next billion people are about to be born into some of the worst off parts of the planet. AI becoming good enough to replace researchers would be an infinitely more positive trajectory than some of the others we could end up on on otherwise.
Social media could have been utopian, too, yet those apps are algorithmic manipulation hellscapes that threaten to bring down even the most robust democracies. The same people who make it so are poised to be the ones in control of these AIs. I don't think they want the kind of utopia you imagine.
What I described doesn't have to be utopian in an absolute sense, just significantly better than where we're currently headed.
I think a lot of the unchecked pessimism around super-intelligent AI is just people being a bit naive or shut off from the reality of just how terrible things are going to be over the next century.
We're waging 25% tariffs over planefuls of people, what's going to happen when it's 100 million people trampling over borders trying to escape disease, famine, and temperatures incompatible with human life?
Compared to that, even if these companies abuse their ownership of AI and monopolize the gains, an AI capable of producing novel research and development by itself would still bring us much closer to solving major problems than otherwise.
And you think the tools that are, as we speak, boiling rivers and lakes in order to power the insanely resource-hungry AIs is the solution to any of those problems, such as famine and rising temperatures? If anything, they're accelerating us towards these issues.
There's about to be 500 billion dollars invested in generating even more electricity for these monstrosities, instead of literally anything else actually useful today that we could be putting towards climate research or renewable energy. Nope, we're just gonna generate even more spam and bullshit while spinning up nuclear reactors to power it all.
If they don't pan out we won't even reach 500 billion dollars actually invested and tbe bubble will pop. And it'll take many many many trillions before AI is even close to the biggest reason climate change is killing people.
People tend to take different pieces of mutually exclusive end states. Like my comment is speaking to a fantasy like outcome where again, we have AI that puts all researchers out of jobs.
If it can do that (which I don't think it will, but if we're dreaming it), let it boil oceans, let them abuse it, you can become unfathomably wealthy by solving world hunger.
Let them force countries to take out loans that practically put then in OpenAI's permanent debt to access the advancements they come up with.
It's still better than the alternative, and it still allows room for them to be as evil as they want.
I mean either way countries are going to become indebted to companies eventually if we keep down the current path. I don't see how the ultra wealthy can't use mass upheaval and desperation to secure extremely cheap labor and solidfy their power even without AI.
At least now, even if it's for their own personal gain and amusement, they can trivially solve
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It's like we're talking about someone potentially developing a cure for all cancer, but everyone is worried because the company behind it is evil and will hoard it for themselves while charging $1B per dose: let's still get to that cure if it can be developed.
It'll be a truly miserable and awful world watching people we know die while there's a cure, and watching them die because they're not able to pay this villain... but today there's no cure, no proof one can exist, no hints on how to get one.
It's better to have the cure and no clue how to fix the broken situation that it creates, than to have no cure and no clue how to fix cancer, because one is a problem of people/power/ethics and the other is a problem of unknown proportions and guaranteed ongoing suffering not more damaging than having a cure, no matter how inequitable access to it is.
The problem emerges when the ones monopolizing the research use it for their own ends, which are to control everyone else.
So instead of being used to improve quality of life, AI gets used to improve efficiency of death.
I agree in part with your views.
Though I think you misunderstand or underestimate human nature of self interest. Everyone that is in control of a superpower like this will abuse it. Be it on a presidential level, be it on CEO level, be it a major shareholder of a foreign NGO. That is why we had democratic splits of types of power in the first place. I say "had" because the trend globally is leading to right wing autocratic ideas due to manipulation of social media.
Human self interest and egocentric world views is what gave us this mess.
The only thing capable of evening out the odds is a federalistic decentralized approach, which we desperately need for AI. Something like a legislative system for lots of overfitted mini AI assistants that also give outliers a chance to be the social trend.
Otherwise we will land up with the ministry of truth, which, right now is Facebook and TikTok effectively. The younger generations that grew up with social media tend heavily towards populist right wing ideas because those are easily marketable in 30 seconds. Paint the bad guy, say that it is established fact, next video. Nobody is interested in the rationale behind it, let alone finding and discussing a compromise like you would in a real debate that wants to find a solution.
We need to find a way to change beliefs through rationale rather than emotions. Ironically this problem is also reflected in trained LLMs that turn into circlejerks because they've learned that from the dataset of us easily manipulateable humans.
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I don't think it's that simple. For one thing, AI isn't a democratizing force. If it's as good as you think it will be, it will be less like having a good education and more like having an indentured servant. Some people will have whole fleets of such servants doing their bidding, while others will have none.
For another, research isn't an end unto itself. As you note, for some people an already-unfathomable level of societal knowledge has resulted in nothing but continued poverty. Benefit from scientific knowledge requires a stable economy full of consumers who can and will purchase high-tech items. Where will that wealth come from once the value of human intellectual labor has been so undercut by cheap AI intellectual labor? Without the capitol to make AIs work for us, most if not many people will be left to live their life as servants to AIs so that those AIs are able to have autonomy in the real world.
> why such a rush?
OpenAI alone spent $20G plus some unknown value to make the first version of it we have now. They and all the others need to justify the investment.
Pretty impressive, only $20 grand?
$20GIGA, not grand.
I wonder why he uses custom units. Who the hell speaks in G$.
$20 grand^3. Forgot the ^3.
GAZILLION!
> why such a rush
First mover / Fear of missing out.
Frankly, inclusion of "AI" in a tool is a great way to ensure I don't use it.
My thought has been they are forcing it knowing nobody, as in 98% of people, would give a crap about most of the AI features. People have been using these tools for decades now to solve their problems and there's a lot of muscle memory to overcome even if the 'new way' were in fact better. I myself have found I only adopt new software, and techniques (including things like using/learning keyboard shortcuts, etc), that's a minimum of 2X better/faster than my de facto personal preference or legacy approach of tackling the problem. And, even if >10X, if it's something I do infrequent I still won't be interested in changing my ways. I have a lot of muscle memory that goes into how I build something like a new spreadsheet, even complicated ones. I'm not interested in putting AI into that process.
I have a grandfather that actually took an early retirement package, age 55, specifically because company gave him an ultimatum regarding switching from typewriter to a PC in the 80s. I feel like AI is pushing me towards making that same choice, I don't really care for using it in my work specifically (have no ultimatum at present).
I use it sparsely and it's more of a toy/novelty to me. Although, I do see how it helps other fields more/less and could replace humans in some professions - I'm not a SWE.
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Did Microsoft fire engineers? I heard they had difficulties recruiting ones in the first place.
We still have no AIs developing anything, they aren't even sensibly integrated in workflows where only written texts need to be parsed and processed.
Fascinating strategy. It looks like they're forcing everybody into it, so it's opt-out, except there is no opt-out in the initial version of the app. They seem to be in the process of adding it now.
> In your app (for example, Word), select the app menu, and then go to Preferences > Authoring and Proofing Tools > Copilot > Clear the Enable Copilot checkbox > Close and restart the app.
> If you do not see the related button, it means this button has not been pushed to your Office version yet. Please be patient and wait for the development team to release an update.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-d...
Something about the way Microsoft writes just rubs me the wrong way.
Not: "Please wait for ... an update" But: "Please be patient and wait for ... an update"
It's not just their staff here, it's all over the docs and UI too. They can't write two sentences without saying something condescending and rude.
Like in Word, if you look for how to turn off grammar checking, they'll tell you, but they just have to add "Remember to run spell check. Spelling and grammar errors can seriously undermine what you're trying to say, especially when your boss, your teacher, or that person in HR sees them." [1]
They can't help themselves.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/turn-spell-check-...
> Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off.
They should put it in the bottom corner, next to an animated paperclip instead.
>next to an animated paperclip instead.
Now that would be kinda funny, Clippy powered by modern AI
Well, Copilot is an anagram of "Clip too", which is sort of like Clippy 2.0, or Clippy Too. Microsoft's really missing a trick here!
I'm 85% confident that a paperclip maximizer scenario will include Clippy in a way or another.
Ah yes, the real paperclip doomsday scenario. As was foretold.
"Turn off Clippy" "I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that."
I heard a description of Copilot as "What Microsoft thought Clippy should be". Thanks, but no thanks.
“It looks like you’re trying to build AGI! Need help taking over the world responsibly?”
"It looks like you think whatever I am doing with all this venture capital is AGI! Should I bother to correct you?"
At least it would generate all kinds of memes and conspiracy. Much more entertaining and productive then Copilot.
I wish Microsoft would have the balls to do this. Meme it all the way. At least we'd get some good laughs out of it.
It's honestly disappointing and somewhat strange that they didn't go this route. IP barriers?
Because _everyone hated it_. Now, it seems that everyone also hates copilot, but there is no point pre-dooming it by bringing the dread paperclip back from hell.
Wait, was this prophecy from a decade ago ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo
I don't think Microsoft is at the level of making a meme out of the marketing flagship product yet. Maybe a joke on their Twitter.
I'll start on a slight tangent, but it may well be the solution to your problem.
Earlier this month I received a price increase email from Microsoft for Office 365 - to the tune of a 46% increase.
Not too keen on this I went to their website to check to see if there was a cheaper plan, and it turns out there is. You can "downgrade" to a Copilot-free version of Office 365, and this also does away with that absurd 46% increase.
So you get to remove Copilot -and- dodge another year of price increases.
Mini edit: Microsoft have started rolling out a "Turn off Copilot" options in the settings, I have it now in Word, but not in Powerpoint or Excel.
The MacOS copilot implementation is horrid. Takes up a significant amount of screen space just to offer a summary of the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever reason cannot be a simple button with pop up on click. It’s horrid.
> Takes up a significant amount of screen space just to offer a summary of the email. Cannot turn off. For whatever reason cannot be a simple button with pop up on click.
Because someone had 'Achieve Copilot feature adoption and utilization > 80%' on their VP level OKRs?
Would not put it pass them but truly the macOS office suite is in such disarray that I suspect it’s more mundane that they don’t have any real PMs. Surprising because you would think it would be worth at least some effort.
To this day Excel still does not have ribbon shortcuts so for any excel pros, it’s garbage. I have to run excel in a windows emulated environment.
I can't think of an email I have ever received that needed to be summarized?
Who is writing these super long emails?
> Who is writing these super long emails?
Other LLMs.
Maybe in the future send an email with just a few simple words and phrases that then gets expanded by LLMs on the receiver end. A weird future awaits.
I hope it does not involve typing on a keyboard. Typing on a keyboard is so millennial, and holds back innovation, such as everybody solely using touchscreens in closed walled gardens. I hope the future is an llm that has access to all the context of our lives and then presents 4-5 such different keywords, and you just tap on the ones you want to use for the email. Once the llm is sufficiently trained, the last step can even be skipped and lead to the most seamless and obstruction-free email user experience possible.
Typing is a powerful mental exercise, with each keystroke contributing to improved memory, language development, cognitive adaptability, and concentration – all of which essentially breeds innovation.
The future you described is a wild kind of dystopia.
Mental exercise sounds exhausting and pointless. Think of all the possibilities that getting rid of such unnecessary distractions would open to the users, such as more time for scrolling down in social media and watching ads.
Obviously (dark) joking.
Have you never seen how AI makes texts super long? That needs to be summarized again by the receiver!
Like a reverse compression.
The apple one to summarize texts is even odder. It is a medium almost entirely defined by extreme brevity.
the point is obviously for the AI thing to read your emails -- they are not asking you
I've written some super long emails; but I also include a TL;DR summary at the top when I do. Sometimes, the "how to get to the summary from the current, commonly known info" (long) part is useful; but not for everyone. And certainly not right out of the gate.
That being said, I'd almost never trust an AI to generate the summary part.
People who need to convey complex ideas?
sometimes, super long email threads in corps
I could definitely see value in condensing the threads. Would be nice to see a single message.
Could definitely use this with some of the PG mailing list threads.
> Just let me write
TextEdit all the way.
I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I don’t need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign. I don’t need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.
I am old school. I write books and print them out to edit with red pen. Need all of Word's print features. Not everyone is a "digital writer."
Allow me to introduce you to WordStar, in the "modern" context of Joe's Own Editor.
https://gizmodo.com/sci-fi-writer-releases-free-archive-of-l...
https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor
Edit: I once used WordStar 4 with a daisywheel printer.
> I write books and print them out to edit with red pen. Need all of Word's print features.
The latter really doesn't follow from the former. All? Sounds like you need basic printing..
TextEdit is my editor of choice for 90% of all RTF word processing that I do, when on a Mac.
Do you have a copyeditor and/or proofreader? I'm a production editor. Part of my job is to fix stuff written by people who can write.
You can still proof it. Op is just saying they don't need spellcheck (perhaps because they do have an editor).
Actually the OP specifically said “grammar” checker, which since they can write is likely an intentional distinction. Alternate phrasings reveal the absurd elitism of the statement.
“I don’t need a spellchecker because I can spell.”
“I don’t need a calculator because I can do math.”
As a longtime copy editor and proofreader, I would have to agree that spellcheckers and grammar checkers are not worth shit.
Your comma after features should be a semicolon, but I’m sure you knew that!
No, it needn't be.
My company is blocking it.
I don’t know by what mechanism, so it may only be possible with an enterprise license or through device management. But I know it’s possible because I’m on the email thread where someone sought guidance from management and the directive was affirmed to block it on Macs in our fleet.
It’s really expensive for enterprise — like about the same cost as M365 E3!
For those trying to work out an alternative, I've found OnlyOffice desktop to be pretty good – it's quite similar to the Microsoft products, and fully compatible, but free.
I've been using an old version of Word and Office and have no intention of ever upgrading.
May I suggest Scrivener? It’s somewhat geared toward novels, but is very useful in other domains as well. Plus, it’s a one time buy.
Maybe it's time you vote with your wallet rather than begrudgingly accept the AI?
Go with TempleOS. It doesn't come with any AI.
I'm on Word on a Mac, and I do not see Copilot at all.
What have I done to banish it?
(I'm with you. I actually don't mind Word and Excel, on either platform, because they're good. Excel is pretty great, tbh. But the ongoing goofiness of MSFT is definitely making me look at alternatives more than i used to.)
*EDIT* It appears my refusal to allow AutoUpdate to run at will has saved me? I'm on Word for Mac 16.8.
Office 2003 is my preferred pick for productivity, I use it for all new documents - and best of all there's no ribbon.
Why not LibreOffice?
I use it. Not always great, too bloated and instructions found on the web are often for a different version and just don't seem to work.
But pretty sure it's not worse than Microsoft. I'd rather burn my money than spending it on Microsoft "products".
LibreOffice is probably about 10% of the size of MS Office these days...
As for instructions/support: Changes between subsequent versions are minor. There was a versioning scheme change recently, so you may be thinking "Oh, LibreOffice 7.3 vs 24.8, very different" - no, mostly the same thing, it's just that 24.8 came out in 2024, in August. Also, there is ask.libreoffice.org #libreoffice on irc.libera.chat , and there are Telegram and Matrix channels... so just ask.
But it's true that with 0.1%-0.5% or so of the budget MS Office gets, it's difficult to keep all of the materials fully up-to-date.
Question was to the person who claims he is using Office 2003.
I think LibreOffice 2024 is much better than Office 2003.
Don’t forget I was replying to a person who is using Office 2003 and not paying as they probably paid their once 20 years ago for license and also don’t have any new features.
Last time I tried it (maybe 20 years ago?) there were fidelity issues (documents didn't display exactly identical to authentic Word), and some differences in minor features.
I should probably give it another whirl, although I'm really happy with 2003.
The fidelity issues are still there if you are loading Microsoft formats into LO. All the Microsoft format specificions are a insanely long, complex messes that even Microsoft doesn't follow, so I suspect that will always be so. But Office now read/writes ODF files, so you can ask it to convert into something LO is the authority on. That also means you can send an office user an ODF file, and expect it to be displayed sensibly.
So the friction is still there, but it's a lot less now.
Honestly it has improved quite a bit. The excel like product calc could be better.
Seconded. It’s sane, it’s stable, it’s compatible.
Seconded. Really a sane, decent UI for an office suite and works very well.
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Surprised they didn't Adobe that yet. Or maybe they already have, but it will only really affect enterprise who has actual money to go after.
Slightly surprised it still works on Windows 11. I'd be surprised if it had 64-bit support. I guess thst speaks to their commitment to backwards compatibility.
Office v. X on a Powerbook G4 12-inch. Can't get better than that...
I remember those fun 'lickable' icons
If you throw word behind a firewall with something like little snitch, does copilot disappear? There is probably zero reason word, excel, or powerpoint should need to connect to the internet.
IIRC, excel’s ability to run Python is entirely cloud based, even in the desktop apps. There is, of course, probably zero reason why that would need to be the case either :/
this still makes me super mad.
I was very excited about that feature announcement --- until I realized it was just sending the code to MSFT to parse or whatever.
"Excel understands Python now" would be amazing. What they actually did is completely pointless.
Excel has a sometimes useful feature of gripping data from tables from url.
I’m dating myself but it reminds me of when e-mail hit the mainstream and Microsoft jammed it into every product with no thought for how it would really be used. Like in Excel … every email address in your spreadsheet would open the email client when you clicked the cell. Gee what if I want to edit the value in this cell instead of email the person? We’ll make that possible if you hold shift (or something). It was terrible and this feels exactly the same. The purpose is not to give the user a helpful AI assistant it’s just to be able to say “we have AI”. That’s it.
>Just let me write and leave me alone.
Yeah, we have networked supercomputers in every pocket and on every desk. And word processors and spreadsheets have been around for decades---that use case is a solved problem.
I suppose we can be charitable to Microsoft and say they're trying to innovate, but these AI features lack a clear practical need that they're meeting. It feels more like Big Tech flopping around trying to make the next big thing happen, rather than actually going out into the real world and solving problems actual humans have.
Microsoft is trying to stay relevant and have an answer to Wall St analysis asking them questions about their AI strategy. They will delete AI tools and helpers as soon as the industry goes after another "big idea".
Also, they can now proudly proclaim they have 100M+ subscribers to their AI stuff so it's a huge success :P
I'm glad my web-only 365 (business basic without teams, can't use the family plan because I need a personal domain) just renewed for a year so they can't mess with mine.
This. It is backwards attempt to become "The AI" company. They have sole rights to use OpenAI's technology and the best they can come up with is a price markup to further piss off their customers.
Why would they care if customers whine but remain customers?
That is true. Being a Microsoft customer is to be in an abusive relationship. There is a substantial cost in leaving. At some point you do leave.
I guess making billions of profit isn't enough you need to do something with AI.
I am still on Office 2021 on my Mac, which was the last “non-subscription” offering I could find. No Copilot yet.
Office 2007 works great in wine
I haven't attempted to buy it, but there should be a 2024 version: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
> I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.
Why don't you install and use one of the last single purchase licensed version? Last time I checked they were still available.
maybe we are locked with o365 from our IT department...
Even worse is I get this stupid Copilot thing while typing, interrupting me every two seconds to "generate my text with copilot" instead of oh you know writing text in Word. And when I try it out I get "We encountered a problem validating your Copilot ! license. Learn more about Copilot licensing"
and it doesn't work.
No explanation. I pay for this Office shit (won't anymore now obviously). AI is ruining everything either directly or indirectly. Congrats.
Apple lets their design team make all the critical product decisions, while Microsoft delegates the same responsibility to marketing.
Don't think that's true because increasingly often their marketing is nothing like the actual product. Doesn't feel like any of them are working together internally.
Auto opt-in because again, we are what's for sale, not the software. And 'scuze me, gotta go check my gmail now...
I'm the opposite -- I use both Word and Pages and I much prefer the experience in Pages, especially the page layout. I find Word painful to work with by comparison and I avoid it as much as I can.
Honestly thinking it again after re-reading the article. This feels like not being hungry at all but someone comes, opens your mouth against your will and pushes you a high calorie burger, fries and soda through your larynx. You are going to eat it, like it or not (just to put it politely).
Libreoffice is way better than Pages.
Maybe in terms of being a word processor (i.e. supporting all the layout and editing/proofing features that Word has.)
But if, as the GP says, you want a program to “just let you write” (with some "writing-phase" accoutrements like change-tracking, word count, a dynamic Table of Contents, and so forth) — and you want a pleasant experience while writing, that takes advantage of the acceleration of native OS UI elements to keep that writing as smooth and jank-free as possible... then I’d assume Pages would be the clear winner, no?
(That, or just TextEdit. Though I’m not sure if TextEdit is optimized for novel-length texts the way word processors would tend to be.)
You can just write with LibreOffice. Your example of special acceleration for Apple made software is unfounded.
I happily used LibreOffice for years, and got a small businesses off Word in favor of it (well, OOo at the time). I’m a fan.
But Pages is much more ergonomic, lightweight, and native on a Mac. There’s not a likely scenario where I’d use LibreOffice over Pages.
The issue with nearly all of these software suites is compatibility.
It is ironic, that libreoffice solves this the best, by being truly cross platform and not requiring special software to be purchased on the receiving end: yet it is the momentum of Microsoft Word that would instead hamper adoption of other word processors.
I am thinking about this, because the reason I would choose not to use Pages, is so that I can share my documents to other companies or even people in my company who may not have a Mac.
That's an excellent reason, to be sure. But here we're talking about an app to "just write", like opening a file and start pounding out an article or something. For someone who wants to do that, on a Mac, and who wants basic formatting and word-processory WYSIWYG-edness, I'd recommend Pages.
For someone who wants that I’d recommend LibreOffice as it does all of that as well.
Just not as natively, quickly, or ergonomically.
No idea how that’s true, there is nothing Pages does differently when it comes to opening a file and “just writing” that LibreOffice doesn’t do. If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are always being disingenuous when comparing the software in the first place.
This uh... "discussion".. would make an excellent blog post, comparing Pages/Word and LibreOffice on a mac, based on merits such as:
* Install UX (how difficult, what pop-ups).
* First time user experience.
* Launch speed.
* Consistency with OS (such as using native file dialogs, hotkeys).
* Export Options (perhaps compatibility too).
* Spellchecker (especially if the OS is configured in another language than US english and the processor can detect it).
* Input latency.
I wonder if there would be more, though of this list I think LibreOffice would do very fairly compared to Pages.app and MS Word for Mac.
> If you honestly get hung up that LibreOffice doesn’t look like it was developed by Apple within the last 5 years then you are ultimately being disingenuous
Disingenuous? More like realistic.
I mean this ultimately boils down to “is inconsistent with the design of the rest of the computing experience.” People who care about good, consistent design and can afford to pay for it are Apple’s core market.
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Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5 of Pages. I’ll stick to the one that saves me time every time I open it.
That is because you are starting up word processors instead of a text editor. My text editor starts in less than one second.
Really? It starts in 1 second for me. Must be a Mac thing. I thought they were supposed to be fast?
Well, I didn't count before giving you those numbers. I gave you my feelings, which were way high. It's 1 second for Pages. Libre is too inconsistent to give a number.
It's the story of open-source on Mac. Projects will have an anemic userbase. After all, most Mac users wouldn't be caught dead with Temu MS Word. This means the apps have very poor performance on Mac. No one is filling bug reports.
I think it depends if you preload libreoffice at boot time or not. It makes sense if you are using it daily, not so much if you are using it once every other full moon.
delighted that Office 2019 still seems to work OK
You will own nothing and like it.
Sadly, switching is the only form of protest we can do against such actions.
Also now there on Windows
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It's not weird to be upset by a button which is entirely useless to the functionality of the product, and exists only to add politicization where there needs to be none. In fact, it's shameful that Microsoft did this.
Let's put it this way: if the button was for something you didn't agree with - say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of buttons in the preferences so it's weird to get mad about it"? I suspect not. I suspect that you would, in fact, be outraged even though that'd be an equally hidden expression of political opinions. We can't, with any fairness, take a stance that political expression is ok but only if it is for the ideas we agree with. So we should (and we used to) agree that things shouldn't have politics forcibly shoved in people's faces, and that we must live and let live. That's a far better way to coexist.
I don't know, the existence of that button seems like a great way to get the "empathy is a sin" folks to self-identify. I'll need that information moving forward because that's a massive red line in my religion.
> say, it was a button for "show your support for the sanctity of marriage", would you blithely say "there are lots of buttons in the preferences so it's weird to get mad about it"?
if I was pretending that my dislike of a button for people to show their support for abolishing gay marriage was rooted in sincere concern for how much time was spent in porting the skin and menu button to another platform versus other more complex features, it would be absolutely right to observe I was being disingenuous in feigning neutral interest in feature prioritization decisions every time I called for it to be removed...
If you don't want the pride skin "shoved in your face", it's relatively easy not to visit the relevant area of the preferences menu and select it, just like people that aren't particularly interested in marriage or Christmas are welcome to refrain from using any of Office's wedding-related or Christmas-related templates
I don't think it is weird. This button really has nothing to do with the product and it's use case as far as I can see.
That is what GP is pointing out as far as I can see.
“it’s weird that you would pick that to get upset about” feels like the kind of spineless jab that I hear a lot from people with a certain political slant, which is fucking annoying because I have the same political slant, and you just make people dislike us with terrible takes like this.
Having checkboxes for fully cosmetic nothings while simultaneously releasing features that cannot be disabled feels strange given they are clearly able to put the required effort in for a hollow, mealy mouthed, capitalistic pandering effort.
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You can turn it off. Go to preferences -> Copilot and uncheck the Enable Copilot checkbox.
As the article explains, that's not been implemented on Mac yet.
That's not correct and also not what the article says. They are only talking about Excel and PowerPoint.
"We're working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices."
I am using Word on my Mac (version 16.93) and do have a checkbox that disables Copilot.
Odd - I also have 16.93 on Mac and I don't get the checkbox (unless I just can't find it I guess).
Well, I'm on a Mac and it 100% has been implemented for me -- I tried to figure out how to turn it off as soon as I first saw it, went to preferences, found the checkbox. I didn't realize that hasn't been rolled out to everybody.
Updating story and a rolling update. It'll probably be there within a few days. But it is legitimate that some don't have the option yet.
My problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.
Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...
Teams is the most loathsome piece of collaboration software I have ever used. When it comes to finding basic things, the UX is so far from intuitive that it makes you wonder if they're just trolling us with these awful designs. I remember being excited about a Slack competitor when it first came out, but the same issues it had back then still exist to this day. I wish they would just pull the plug on that piece of crap.
I still don't understand why Ctrl plus shift plus C starts a call on teams when V pastes text unformatted and it is right next to it. At least let me reassign this shortcut...
And the New Teams removed the ability to copy formatted chat logs with timestamps! I used that every single day
So I'm NOT crazy for remembering that being a feature in old Teams! Thanks for confirming!
I don't like Teams, but personal preference aside, I hate how in most companies I've worked at, there's multiple communications channels. 365 should be a one stop solution for this, emails, calendars, meetings, files, and chat, but in practice a lot of IT organizations also use Slack alongside it. Where I work now there's a split between IT and the rest because the rest uses Teams while IT uses Slack, causing the barrier between the two to increase, especially since designers - who should work closely with development - are on the Teams side of the fence.
Fun fact if you want to change your office hours timezone to something other than the US default in Teams, you can't do it from Teams, you can't do it from Outlook, you can ONLY do it from the settings in the Outlook web app. Absolutely bizarre and broken situation
And if you're a consultant and need to move between the multiple Teams instances that your clients use... it is so very painful.
You're not wrong.
In our org, at least, it's also the latest example of MSFT winning partly by being everpresent and partly by stumbles from competitors.
We are 100% work from home -- the company has no offices anywhere. Consequently, we do a lot of online meetings, with an emphasis on screensharing. (I don't think we've ever turned on cameras.) Our standard for a LONG time was GoToMeeting, because while it was more expensive, it WORKED every time, including and especially when we used it with customers.
But GTM got sloppy, and Teams was suddenly everywhere, and then GTM messed up their easy Outlook integration, and all of a sudden we were using Teams.
It's not a Slack competitor if it comes free with your current Microsoft licence. It's just a takeover. If it were any good it would've steamrollered Slack, not competed with it.
This reminds me of a very old e-mail from bill gates to his direct reports about the poor usability of windows (xp?)
This one? https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...
Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)
Rereading that makes me shake my head. Things didn't get that bad overnight. The fact that so many UX crimes were allowed to fester is proof that Microsoft doesn't care about or understand UX.
That is (was?) the problem, it reads like a dozen different teams were involved in that whole process and they all talked past each other, or there was no unified vision, or no process manager involved. But keeping oversight and ensuring a single view of a whole set of products like that is difficult. Of course, Microsoft didn't make it easy for themselves either, at the time having Windows Update via a website and no "app store" equivalent.
That said, the current state isn't that much better; they do have an app store at the moment, but all the alternatives are still there as well. Developer tools you install via nuget or chocolatey or whatever, games via Steam, Epic, or each individual developer's launcher, loads of stuff you just get via a download off a website, etc.
Every task I do in teams feels compromised as far as UX goes.
I loathe using that app.
But with Copilot you can now ask it to find the file for you. Isn’t AI amazing?
I work in IT support helping customers with this type of thing and this specific problem you just described still trips me up regularly.
And it's been like that at at least 3 or 4 companies I've worked at so it's not just this specific organisation.
You aren't wrong - however GP didn't use the terms "Teams" and "SharePoint". Those terms should never be used next to "understandable" unless properly negated or followed by "/s".
> that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot)
This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy
They are doing the same thing to Xbox right now. Really working hard to kill the brand.
Yep. I've been an Xbox player since 2002. Huge Halo fan. Thousands of hours on 3 different generations of Xbox. I still have my Halo 3 special edition helmet. I keep up with gaming news and listen to multiple gaming podcasts every week.
But even I can't reliably name the last two generations of Xbox without a pause. I always have to stop for a second and think it thru because the naming scheme is so abysmal.
It gets worse. Did you see this ad?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYBSNQLsBKk
Looking at the market, I think we can all agree where Microsoft is heading:
The XBOX COPILOT, the new handheld PC powered by AI!
XboX ActiveX XP CoPilot 360-365.NET 2025 Pro Azure Edition
Not to be confused with Entra (formerly Azure AD) Edition
But that's my lived experience. I play Xbox games with friends who are playing on an Xbox console, but I'm playing on my Windows-based Legion Go or my Windows PC on a desk at home or even cloud rendered through a web browser on a Linux box.
Xbox isn't just a single physical hardware device. Its a platform for playing games.
I do agree though, the naming patterns for their consoles has been absolutely atrocious. I consider myself somewhat of a gamer but if you just gave me the list of consoles there's absolutely a non-zero chance I'd fail at picking the rankings of performance and age.
And ActiveX before that. It literally just meant self-activating COM objects but came to include a scripting host, OLE, CDO, and a multimedia framework.
Ahhh!! So that's when they added .NET to the name Visual Basic .NET
Well, Visual Basic .net is based on the .net framework, can't deny that. It's a very different language from the previous non-.net Visual Basic versions, so much that some people rather argue that "Visual Basic" is the problematic part of the name, not the ".net".
Though also interesting to note that the development team at the time didn't feel like it was substantially a different language and the first VB.NET compiler was Version 7.
It’s funny seeing the Stockholm syndrome in action (or plain old forgetting) with OneDrive being touted as being part of the products, whereas it was the beginning of the mess that is now Office.
> what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office)
I only assume you refer to the pre 2000 state of Office. Confusion started way befor AI.
And to me the OneDrive - was forced on my in the job - was never a properly usable product, allowing others think differently, but to me, its weird ways and failures (i.e. renaming files) are jus barriers to efficiency.
This hacker news post is refreshing but unexpected. When I’ve one googled reviews of one drive, i’ve usually found the top results are threads of IT folks raving about how great one drive is compared to shared drives.
I have always been puzzled by the threads since it’s a mess with a bad UI with bad default locations for the various programs.
Before Office 365 (later Microsoft 365), things were pretty clear.
The move to a subscription model is where I started to lose the thread, and it’s gotten worse from there.
I understand OneDrive as Microsoft’s version of Dropbox, but the more it’s integrated into Windows/Office, the more confusion it causes me.
I was confused to discover (while deleting OneDrive), that it had changed my Desktop folder from User/Desktop to User/OneDrive/Desktop.
That confused me too. Made me a little angry when I was looking for something in Documents. I went to Users\username\Documents and the data wasn't in that folder. Turns out Windows maintained two Documents folders. That one + OneDrive\Documents.
I had uninstalled OneDrive the first time I used this laptop. But that wasn't enough. I had to reinstall OneDrive. Turn off folder backups. Unlink the PC from OneDrive. Then uninstall it again. That fixed the two Documents folders problem. OneDrive\Documents went away and the contents put back into Users\username\Documents.
A fairly frustrating experience and wasted about an hour troubleshooting it.
It was all part of Microsoft 365 already; Copilot just adds the AI slop.
Yes, and I was already struggling to understand what Microsoft 365 actually meant. Adding AI and renaming it all to Copilot is the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Microsoft 365 = Word documents without absolute positioning.
I tried it once to make a lost cat poster and ended up just using Krita.
> My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.
It’s been broken for some time, mate. The era of subscription based models blurred it long ago.
Copilot is turning into Microsoft's Watson.
Im still trying to figure out if Loop is part of normal Office or what. Its a better OneNote since they seeminly dont update OneNote at all.
Please, never in its history has anything from Microsoft been "clearly understandable".
Notepad is quite simple
It even has usable features, like inserting the current date and time (my cat showed me that one!)
First I've ever noticed this. I was little surprised it now has infinite tabs, did that come in with win11? I also noticed today that it has autocorrect, never noticed that before! I generally just use it as a clipboard for ascii text so it might be it's been like this forever.
> use it as a clipboard for ascii text
this was one of my favorite uses as well, especially when copying something from Word. copying to Notepad before copying to a terminal has saved me from so much grief of debugging why something is acting other than expected
Copilot is a button. ;)
30 years of their home name Office brand, known by pretty much every person that's ever had a computer
let's get rid of that, and make the unreliable bullshit generator the main brand instead
certainly a courageous decision
That was my line of thinking as well. The article pointed out that they rebranded to Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office, maybe Office 365 if they're being real fancy and specifically want to refer to the subscription service.
My take is that Microsoft assumed that everyone is calling it Microsoft 365, which they don't.
30 years of owning the term "Office", having almost every single person who ever touched a computer know that Office is the Microsoft office productivity suite, then deciding that a sort of working, but yet to be 100% defined LLM is more important. The fact that no one stopped this or that shareholders aren't pissed tells you something about how absolutely broken modern computing is.
I feel like there has to be some weird cultural problem at Microsoft where nobody wants to speak up about obviously bad ideas.
They destroyed the entire Xbox brand overnight and hampered any chance at recovery with a stupid confusing naming scheme... now it seems like they've learned nothing from that?
They either forgot they are in fact the evil overlord or they never read the list.
> 12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation
99% of designers and ux people at MS aren't using Windows as their daily driver or using Microsoft tools.
Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
But seriously, I do think it's still one of the most hilariously stupid product names EVER in the history of products, to name the third thing in a series "xbox one". They'll have that idiocy forever bahahahahahah!!!!
>Wait what, you don't know that you should purchase the brand new Xbox Series XA, and not the Xbox One 720 S ...?
Seriously, I have an xbox one and couldn't tell you which model it is, even after looking at pictures of them. I know there is a newer better model out now that looks similar and has a similar name. If I wanted to spend the $600 or whatever to upgrade tomorrow, I wouldn't know which one to buy.
I worked at a company a couple years ago that was running on Active Directory, Outlook, and good old fashioned Windows and Microsoft Office licenses. They wanted to "modernize" and so I was to learn about Teams/M365/Azure/Entra/Copilot/etc, and report on some options for what licenses we could get and which products we could use. It was bananas how difficult it was for me to understand what their product offerings were, due to frequent name changes and multitude of overlapping products/licenses. It was my job to figure out what software we wanted to pay them for, and Microsoft made it as difficult as possible - what they actually wanted was for us to get on calls with their sales staff, so they could tell us what we should pay them for.
Why would shareholders have a problem with it? People with big money currently value AI bullshit more than recognizable branding.
Because Microsoft just pissed away their biggest brand after Windows and maybe Microsoft. Brand recognition holds value, a lot of value.
Imagine Pepsi deciding that they are done with Pepsi Max, arguably their biggest brand, after Pepsi itself, and decides that it's now Pepsi Cake. Just kill of all references to their biggest brand. That wouldn't go down well and Microsoft is only getting away with it because pretty much everyone who needs it already have their subscription.
Imagine killing the globally recognized Twitter brand for a single generic letter.
The common denominator is ego. Office may be a globally recognized brand, but it was defined by someone else, and the person making the decision needs to mark their territory.
That's okay because everyone just calls it twitter anyway. there will be kids on twitter, calling it twitter, who were never alive when it was still named twitter
Yep. They obviously learned nothing from killing Xbox overnight.
As an IT person I can guarantee this rebranding is going to cause confusion that will waste my time.
That being said, Coke killed Coke Zero and seems to be doing okay I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Coke Zero still exists?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_Zero_Sugar
it's now coca cola zero sugar.
I only just now noticed it changed in the US, which apparently happened in 2022. I remember seeing "Coca-Cola sin azúcar" and "Coca-Cola sans sucre" in foreign markets before, I feel like I saw that pre-2022. I don't recall ever seeing a "Coca-Cola cero", for instance. Kind of feels like it was more aligning the brands internationally but maybe I'm just misremembering.
Literally everyone I know calls it "Coke Zero" - in fact, the "Zero" pattern has spread to the various soda companies to reflect the particular style of zero sugar.
Sure, that's why it was a weird rebranding.
They probably felt that it stopped being cool, it's now just a common name, so they went ahead and made it into something more legible.
I'm a shareholder and I have a problem with it. It's a bad focus and product strategy over-dosing on AI hype which I think will hurt them in the future.
I mean, long-term shareholders might raise an eyebrow; presumably the bubble will, at some point, burst.
> The thing is, no one ever calls it anything but Office
Are you calling it office when you are starting up Teams, powerBI or Microsoft Stream? I don't.
As a user of Teams on Windows, I was so glad to find out I can map each Channel's files to a folder on my computer and edit files using LibreOffice rather than the "will it load?" crapshoot of using the web version Office that runs inside the Teams app.
It's all sharepoint under the hood, which is why it's terrible, but you can just open things in sharepoint...
I only started using MS cloud stuff last year. This whole Onedrive/SharePoint split confuses the hell out of me.
I don't really know what SharePoint is. It seems like kind of an online site builder/file sharing platform? I'm not sure why those would go together. In any case, I get the impression it's kind of deprecated and Onedrive seems much easier to understand.
Sharepoint is like a big umbrella intranet/collaboration enterprise product. It's old, has a million sub-products, is heavily customizable, and is not really intended for normal users to actively do too much with beyond swap files. Onedrive is just microsoft branded dropbox or google drive. Since it's more focused and is a consumer-facing product, not really surprising that users prefer it. While I wouldn't call sharepoint deprecated per se, MS will probably continue to encourage larger and larger companies to just work out of onedrive.
Thank you, "cloud version of old school intranet" is a better mental model than what I was working from previously.
Hey, be proud. The executive who pitched this gets a second mansion! Everyone wins, right?
Nothing will change until there's actual skin in the game for leadership. Leadership screws up and at worst they get some 7 figure exit package and still have no issues finding a job.
Yeah, right now it’s a feature of a product, not a product.
I understand people who love Apple (or the OSS world) unconditionally and I understand people who hate either, but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft. Feels like there isn’t a single product person left in the company, no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."
- Steve Jobs. 1996
I guess some things never truly change. And thst kind of" culture" is how you amass a cult following (it's in the word, "cult" ure).
Outside of early Xbox I can't think of many counterexamples to this.
Well, that's not quite fair. NT is a very interesting and definitely original kernel design, for example; NTFS is a file system with unique properties, and AJAX was an API devised at Microsoft (that one absolutely lacks taste, but at least it's an original idea).
That being said, I agree that the company and the brand evoke nothing but negative emotions in me, and I don't know anyone that would have anything better than "meh" on them.
Those are all technical implementation details, not product features that everyday users can develop an emotional attachment.
NT is a very interesting DEC VMS clone (developed by the same team). In fact 9x was much more original design.
[dead]
It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago.
Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus.
Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance.
Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.
Well there is only so much you can do with Word and Outlook.
Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting a long time ago.
Excel has interesting new features. It’s the only reason I'm contemplating upgrading.
Would you mind writing down some of the exciting new Excel features? I am asking as an Excel user that 5 years ago used to love this tool (so much so that I would have paid for Excel if my employers did not provide it for free). Excel 2010 was peak Excel for me.
PS. Nobody I know uses Excel's Turing-complete Lambda-calculus. None of my former colleagues in Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Investor Relations, FP&A use it.
XLOOKUP, XMATCH, dynamic arrays and related functions. There are also new regex functions, but it seems that those didn’t make the cut for Excel 2024, unfortunately. I had situations in the past where lambdas would have been handy.
What about the super exciting new Teams and Outlook!
Exciting, and not in a good way.
Teams has popup ads inside the app itself. No, I don't give a bloody damn about whatever stupid new feature you're trying to force upon me when I'm in the middle of a deep conversation with a coworker.
I was trying to join a meeting in Teams from the calendar when up popped a “How are you enjoying Calendar” star rating dialog. I’ve never once listed “Office Calendars” amongst things that I enjoy. Much less now with this needy feedback blocking me from entering the meeting.
Those constant pop ups are super annoying
You mean super aggravating.
Do you suspect that their plan to use Windows 11 to force everybody onto hardware with a TPM is the result of:
> no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing
Based on their increasingly user-hostile decisions up to this point (re: tricking people into using edge, ads in the start menu, etc) it's pretty clear that the name of the game is to monetize their privileged position as OS vendor by selling their users out to the highest bidder.
I expect they want TPMs everywhere so that they can abuse the passkey protocol's "attestation statement" to include attestations to advertisers about the user themselves, rather than about the auth circumstances (which is what that field is for). Being able to expose details about the human on the other side of an otherwise anonymous browser session is big money for advertisers, and if everybody has a TPM Microsoft can cryptographically exclude competitors from that channel (they no longer have to care if you're using chrome instead of edge). As for the AI everywhere, that's how they'll get to know you so that there's something to sell.
They've got a lot of thought going into their product, it's just that none of that thought is for the benefit of their users. Which is why I heartily disagree with:
> I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft
They used to make relatively good desktop OS and Office software with a consistent UI/UX - Windows 2000/XP/7, Office 97/2000 (if you disable Clippy). Then IMHO it went downhill first slowly and now faster. May be people are still attached to the platform they used for years.
It seems like you get a promo for changing names of things. The more convoluted, the higher you get.
I wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have to assert their dominance by making a change just for the sake of making a change.
It's probably easier to get ahead by saying you launched a "new product", than "Office release 974".
I think when a company loses their founder, vision and leadership just aren't the same.
apple is also getting watered down. I don't think they've really come out with anything truly novel after sj passed away. In comparison to the ipod or iphone or ipad, the apple watch, vision, apple pay don't seem groundbreaking.
I find them easy to hate as I only use their products when I work for some company that has made the mistake of standardising on them.
If you don't hate microsoft after a few months of working remotely using Teams, Outlook etc, I'll be pretty impressed
>but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft
I use a bunch of their products, but I have a strong negative emotion towards them.
It does seem like their mainstream products are as tastelessly managed as ever.
But in the (small?) corner of developer products they've been pretty good: Typescript, VSCode, .NET/C#/F#, LSP, Lean are all great and very influential contributions.
I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages and somehow it has become completely unfit for purpose. Two series of data, one table of 300 cells containing one automatically extrapolated formula that multiplies the value of the cells in the series. A trivial spreadsheet use case that was solved 40 years ago. Changed the values in one series, and the table just... didn't update. Clicked into the cells and the formulas are right, they're referring to the right cells, it just doesn't update. I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?! How is such a fundamental feature of the spreadsheet so utterly broken?? You expect me to go and manually verify that all dependent cells have updated every time I change anything anywhere? Microsoft, you have failed at your most fundamental purpose, zero points awarded.
So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft right now.
The irony is something like 99.999% of spreadsheets in use today have zero calculations. People think of Excel primarily as a way to lay out text on two axes. It's mind-blowing but I see people write out a series of expenditures down a single column and then pull out a desk calculator, add them up, and enter the sum at the bottom
There is a setting in excel that disables auto calculation. This is useful for people who are (ab)using excel with massive data sets and crazy calculations. It sounds like this setting may have been on
Trust me, it wasn't. It was the first thing I checked. It was set to automatic mode.
> I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages … I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?!
You sure that wasn’t an operator error? Sounds like a pretty basic feature to not have working.
Trust me, I assumed I did something wrong. 20 minutes of investigation later, I exhausted every other reasonable possibility other than that the software is simply broken. Fun fact, the key combo to manually recalculate all cells is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9. That fixed it, but I'll never, ever trust Excel for anything again.
The crazy part to me is that, with a family subscription, the new AI privileges are only available to the primary account holder and not the rest of my family. That’s nuts.
> For Microsoft 365 Family subscribers, Copilot will be available to the subscription owner and cannot be shared with others.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/01/1...
>the new AI privileges are only available to the primary account holder and not the rest of my family.
Heh. Things like that drive my wife absolutely crazy. I get to tease her about Microsoft wanting my OK if she tries to do something out of bounds.
For some people, having no AI is a feature.
Maybe they are at least trying to avoid collecting data of underage people...
There's an easier way, don't collect and train on the data for them.
For the downvoters, parent commenter has a valid point because COPPA[1] exists and it applies to online services like Copilot.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Pr...
Like my wife in her forties?
Yeah but then at least allow one to manually enable things later if they so choose, but I guess the cost aspect of the AI goes too close to negative even after the second user.
I just downgraded my O365 subscription to remove Copilot. I went to (web version) my account settings, subscriptions, manage, and canceled my sub, which then gave me the option to select a Classic edition without Outlook. It's the same price, which is hilariously stupid, but maybe the worst part is that it doesn't deactivate Copilot until the next billing cycle. So, whether you can't use Copilot for security and privacy reasons or you recognize that it is one of the most cataclysmic software failures in human history--I'm serious, compared to other "AI" platforms, its utility is nonexistent, and that's without addressing other issues with "AI" as a category--you're stuck with it until the next billing cycle.
What an absurd mess.
> it is one of the most cataclysmic software failures in human history
idk ariane 5 crashed because of an int overflow
This is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family: It's time to consider switching to
--==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==--
because:
1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans.
2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac.
3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to tell anyone about you or share a copy of your private documents.
4. No logging into anything or managing licenses.
5. You can download and use it for free: www.libreoffice.org (and it's on Chocolatey and WinGet too I think, if you're in Windows-land) . But of course it helps a lot when people also donate.
7. It has good community support; and there are also options for paid support, training, transition and deployment if you're in a business or organization.
8. There are also written guides in several languages for those who like that format, and there are some video tutorials etc.
and finally:
9. It is managed by a democratically-run public foundation with members from across the world. There are no large companies or governments pulling the strings or calling the shots.
It does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.
Which Desktop environment are you looking at? The "UI kit" is different on different platforms (the idea is to use native widgets)
If you mean the fact that it's not ribbony, with a lot of unused empty space between widgets and with mobile-phone-like aesthetic - the rejection of that style is intentional. Microsoft went that way, and hurt usability; LibreOffice has not. Although some argue emphatically that it's the way to go in order to attract new users.
For those who like a more ribbon'y UI style - it's available as an option. On the menu, choose "View > User Interface..." TBH, that's not fully-developed and I don't like it much.
One other aspect of modernization is that there is a dark mode, which has improved a lot over the past couple of years: https://itsfoss.com/libreoffice-dark-mode/
but if you have specific suggestions/rants - UI/UX discussions are always ongoing, albeit slowly given the immense size of the project and the amount of dialogs and UI/UX aspects to be considered and improved. Try the "LibreOffice Design" channel on Telegram for example.
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
We will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not.
Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on pretending otherwise for a few years.
No one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago.
The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever).
I'm
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I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays.
Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.
I want to work with people who can communicate thoughts effectively and will write some damn documentation.
People who whine about writing being difficult or unimportant are going to be deficient in both.
That sounds dystopian…
Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically better at writing more essays. It’s supposed to train your ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound reasoning.
I sort of had that in my HS English classes more than 30 years ago. Every paper we ever wrote for my final two years was in class for one hour. Occasionally we would get a second class period to work on our papers but the teacher held them until the next class period.
I got really good at getting my thoughts down quickly and efficiently. My freshman English course in college nearly broke me however since we were required to revise our papers at least twice after getting feedback, even if the feedback as overwhelmingly positive. It was a skill I had never developed.
Blue books are back baby!
Honestly the most impactful writings I ever had to write in my education were required to fit within a standard bluebook.
https://uvamagazine.org/articles/blue_books
Ours were a certain beige colour.
Just for their essays to fed into an llm at the end of the day owned by mega corp.
> with key-logging + copilot off
That assumes Microsoft allowing you to do so.
I think it's the death of essays and also of reading. Why read a book when AI can read it for you? Teachers I know have already seen this happening.
> Why read a book when AI can read it for you?
When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible.
If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway (if you're required to do something with it short summary, you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing way before the "AI" hype).
Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
> maybe just had it less accessible
Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:
- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet
- read the summary
- write your paper
It would still take you hours.
Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.
You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.
> If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway
This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.
You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.
> Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
You're underselling how much easier the access is.
> If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.
A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.
Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
> Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system.
I must apologize, because my parent comment wasn't well thought out.
Rather than saying "wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place" (which wasn't logical, sadly, I got carried on an emotion) I should've said that it has a limit to its usefulness. It probably was a meaningful system back in the day, just not future-proof. So it eroded over time and isn't a reliable or fair system anymore, with questionable meaningfulness when it comes to the new reality.
> Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree on this, hard. It happens that I'm a person who holds a very unpopular opinion on this matter.
Online games that competed on things like manual dexterity were and still are fun, valuable and entertaining. But it's also true that they're based on a fundamentally flawed principle (the existence of a "perfect shot", if we're talking about aimbots) that simply won't stand the progress.
As someone who believes in transhumanism, I perceive things like aimbots or wallhacks as aids, similar to glasses, exo suits or thermal googles. And I believe that tools are always "good" (if that's applicable term) as the very humanity has foundations in tool invention and use. It's only the consequences of their application (which are heavily context-dependent) have different moral values depending on the outcome.
The world is inherently unfair because everyone is born and raised in different conditions, gaining different bodily and mental capabilities. I despise the idea of leveling everyone down below any arbitrarily "acceptable" capability ceiling of what they can do with their "bare hands, eyes and minds" - in my book, this goes against the idea of progress. I rather wish to see the very opposite. Put bluntly, I want every single gamer to have the best aimbot there is, and the game mechanics is changed to keep things still competitive, challenging, engaging and fun. Which means some games (or possibly even genres) are going to die, but - hey - we aren't playing 3x3 tic-tac-toe anymore either, even though we used to do so when we were little kids with limited brainpower.
Last, but not least, I strongly suspect that the aspect we all hate is not some "cheating" (I believe it's a misdirection) but rather griefing - such as playing against the opponents of drastically different capabilities, aka punching the babies.
Heck, I want to live in a world, where someone making a good bot is celebrated, not stigmatized. Playing against bots can be made fun, too. I loathe the current trends of the industry towards tightening things down, with all the rootkits, and people hating others for something like having a programmable mouse.
I recognize it could be a very naive worldview, but that's what I currently believe in.
And, uh, sorry for a probable off-topic. It just happened that your comment tickled one of my pet peeves :-)
Yeah, I think the existence of Reader's Digest makes your point for you. I remember the first time my dad explained that it was misnamed because it wasn't really for the readers. It was for the people who didn't want to read.
>Why read a book when AI can read it for you?
because learning to read and to write is learning to think, and if you're the only person with some autonomy while everyone else regurgitates the same AI slop that's going to give you a lot of opportunity.
Ever since the internet has been around it's been easy to outsource your work, it won't do anything for you in the long run.
I mean, summaries of books have existed for, pretty much, as long as books. People still read books.
I'm a bit of an AI doomer, but I don't think AI will have such a bad impact on school tests. They'll just have to move back to oral exams.
I remember reading that Socrates was against writing. His argument was that books don't hold real knowledge because you can't interrogate team. Real knowledge exists only in a man's mind because he can make use of it and answer questions about. I don't quite agree but I do see some merit to the idea. For example, NASA couldn't fly to the moon again by building a Saturn V because even though they still have all the documentation, most of the people who knew how to make use of that documentation are dead or retired.
Hopefully its just a return to the in class bluebook essay. That is like a force multiplier in learning imo due to how much you need to prep to feel confident going into them.
Kids have to write essays with pencil and paper now. Of course they have to write in print because they stopped teaching cursive a decade ago.
No I'm not joking.
The death of the high school essay will be when people realize best learning is done on the job and we get rid of highschools altogether.
We had child labor and it was horrible, if you only learn to work, and only learn through work then it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation by others. And an employer is highly motivated by capital to exploit you as much as possible.
Take 2 minutes to realize how having highschools solves none of the problems you describe.
They won't get that far because the kids with more education will get the job.
Microsoft really has to pull itself together in terms of product branding. Microsoft 365 itself was a terrible name for an office suite, but adding a "copilot" at the end is hitting too low a bar. Not sure how it even got an approval in the first place.
Today, I noticed there was a new App on my Windows laptop at work, because the Apps section was highlighted. "That's weird," I thought "I don't _remember_ installing anything."
So, I expand "Apps", and I see an item named "Microsoft CoPilot 365". It absolutely did not occur to me that this was a rebranded/updated Office. I simply thought "Aww, man, Microsoft is at it again, raining some new crap on me that I never asked for." Without a moment's thought I right-clicked it and uninstalled. Only now as I read this thread I realize I may have accidentally uinstalled MS Office.
My iPad now has a “windows” app.
Teams is now named “Teams (work and school)”
My guess is that the plan will be Office -> Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot -> Microsoft Copilot.
Why was it Microsoft 365 in the first place? Does it not work on leap days ?
Good question, 360 would have been better, full circle coverage of all your (office) productivity needs.
Then the next version would have been Microsoft One.
Microsoft Series X Copilot
Microsoft Series X Copilot for Business E3 with Copilot
The sad part is that that name doesn't feel like that much of a stretch for Microsoft. I wouldn't put it past them to end up with two products called Copilot.
You mean like GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot?
You only pay fro 365 days a year. The leap day is free.
In 2020 I was disappointed they didn't rename it to Microsoft 366.
The Zune didn't ;p
Given how hard Microsoft is leaning into AI, and how important Office 365 is, the Copilot for 365 is shockingly bad.
Every single thing in which M$ has market capture is shockingly bad. Windows, Office, Azure.
Simple as this statement is it is also underrated. When you seriously consider their various products and properties it truly is a shocker at how consistently awful they all are.
This change was probably recommended/implemented via AI.
It's shockingly bad because of how they want it to behave. They don't want it to bullshit, they don't want it to say rowdy things, and they want it stay "on brand".
Well too bad. These things are all modeled after human beings... they're literally called large language models. Human beings bullshit, they say rowdy things, and they don't always stay on brand.
The only way to have an exceptional AI is you actually "raise" (train) it like you would a normal human being. That's being learned with the quality of Deepseek's models, although I think they're lying through their teeth about how much it cost to train it. It's in China's interest to bullshit on that metric, so they're bullshitting.
That’s because the alternative is worse.
What's the alternative?
I think these things have potential to improve over time.
If nothing else I do like being able to get a relative quick explanation for how to change some obscure or minute functionality in the Windows OS.
Now, would it be better if the Win OS, by default wasn't obnoxiously in the way with the pretense of being "simpler"? Yes!
At least there are some truly free OS's out there that keep the interface consistent through iterations and generally improve overtime.
I'm sure it will improve over time. I'm just surprised it was as bad as it was at launch, and has improved minimally.
So release them when they work, if ever. Do not release a broken thing and then go “you must use this, in case it is one day non-shit”.
I see you are not familiar with Microsoft.
Granted, they're no strangers to pushing unwanted nonsense on people (remember the ribbon?) but even by their standards this does seem unusually extreme.
Maybe they want to collect data on people using copilot in order to train copilot to be better?
Yes, we called those alphas and betas back in the day.
But I suppose we've been shipping betas as a full release in software for quite a while now. Maybe even soke alphas.
Coming next week, another 8 versions of Teams, all called Teams but with subtly different icons and you can only sign into one of them with your license tier
Don't worry, AI will tell you (possibly incorrectly) which one to use
if they could keep it up to date and accurate that might actually be a useful product, albeit a product I shouldn’t need.
Is there a single big company out there that sanely has not decided to ride this "AI" wave? People being pushed stupid features that no one has ever needed nor asked for? It's Clippy's revenge and you can't get rid of it this time? Microsoft really deserves ton of prizes for ruining so many products.
Not large compared to Microsoft and Amazon, but Nintendo:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/09/legendary-mario-creat...
I can't think of any other than potentially oil and gas (though they probably use a lot of it in head office type environment).
amazon? I mean they have some data center stuff, but amazon-the-website does not seem infected with artificial idiocy yet.
Product pages on Amazon now have AI review summaries.
I like it in theory, but the cynical part of me is suspicious they're somehow using it to skew things positive.
Amazon has its own AI, "rufas," plastered on the site.
And for a while it would helpfully generate python code for you!
What are you talking about, they added a chat bot on amazon.com
I believe it must be US-only then, I don't see it in my european amazon.
Aws docs has a chat bot.
They even had a very Microsoft style rollout for it, where a huge modal for the chat bot would pop up and cover most of the page every single time you went to the docs, with no way to disable it. I tried it out with a very simple database sorting question, and got a completely wrong answer. I don't think I've used it since.
What was hilarious to me was I tried using it to figure out a niche config. I couldn’t use it because my employer totally locks down permissions. Not going to request bot access any time soon.
It's even dumber than it seems at first glance; what people do has changed to the degree where besides a niche market segment of users with deep product knowledge and usage, most activities and work happens in much simpler shapes than a productivity suite is a good fit for. It's primarily tasks using surface level functionality.
This essentially (along with subscriptions and bundling) makes the fit just worse, which in turn makes the value proposition even worse.
The global idea of having something that does what a publisher's desk needs but "on the computer" became irrelevant over 10 years ago, and at the same time, the work that remained moved to where specialised work has always been: in specialised tools. The space between emulating the physical world and processes that are mostly digital but somehow still have to relate to the physical world is pretty much self-eliminating.
I suppose the only thing that remains is a spreadsheet, because it is a tool that has no direct analog. But even there you end up with people using it to manage lists (which you can do with practically anything else) or doing actual spreadsheet work. That split is not really apparent with the other many products in the Copilot suite as the processes it used to be used for are themselves shrinking. For example: we're not writing a larger number of internal memos in Word, we're not creating more brochures in Publisher, and we're not printing letters all day long. Our meetings aren't better because we have outlook, planner, project and onenote. Even if all of those products had 1000 AIs built in, that wouldn't change.
Sprinkling AI around to try and manufacture relevant improvements or relevance for the processes that used to be the primary way to spend a working day only hurts the product.
I tried using Copilot that is embedded into Azure. It couldn’t tell me the right instructions to complete something trivial like exporting a database. Instead, it sent me to an out of date documentation complete with old screenshots. When I asked for the up to date documentation, it refused. Then I asked “Why are all Microsoft products so crap?” and it told me I had violated the content policy and disappeared.
A day later it came back (the chat window embedded into Azure) but now every request generates an error.
I ended up using a combination of other AI, Google and blogs to find what I needed. Even with all the power of AI and all the money they’ve spent on it, Microsoft is still a joke. I wish I didn’t have to use it but it’s going to take time to get off Azure.
Have you tried drinking a verification can?
Microsoft making questionable decisions lately, the official RDP client on Mac was renamed to "Windows App" some weeks ago. It's hard to come up with a worse name, Windows App is what I name any software product that runs natively on Windows.
RIP all the helpdesk employees who have to explain this to end users
I'm not sure if it has to do with the UI redesign and renaming, but I don't feel the new app is as reliable as before. My RDP connections now fail all the time.
> all the helpdesk employees
They should just tell people to use Google's Chrome remote desktop.
A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.
This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.
I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.
It is much better today, but still not perfect. For relatively simple word processing tasks, it is not a problem anymore.
And saving as a pdf is a fine compromise when the receiver doesn't have a need to edit the document.
no office workers is gonna bother doing that
When I worked in an office with my linux machine, Libre office worked for me. No issues really. I didn't do anything super complex, but it was nice to be able to open those file formats.
Though to be fair, I didn't really have a choice in the matter. its was that or the web version of office.
Doesn't Google Docs produce nice usable .docx output? I use it occasionally along with Word, and there doesn't seem to any compatibility issues.
Yeah. I'd go further: Office is a clear exception to the rule that the alternatives tend to be better than the complacent market leader with the massive lockin. Using LibreOffice (or cut down stuff like Pages/Numbers or Google Docs) gets me missing Office features pdq even when I don't need the compatibility, despite me not particularly loving Office's last couple of decades of interface changes, having limited interest in "cloud" and "AI" features, not exactly being a power user of Excel and even having fond memories of other systems' features like WordPerfect's Reveal Codes. And the compatibility issue is obviously massive
> I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student.
How long ago was this?
This was in the early 2010s. Then I tried again in the late 2010s. And again (with Google's suite) a year ago.
It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you. You can't tell them "LibreOffice is so great, you should use it too!" You either use MS Office, or you look like a sloppy amateur when your figures are the wrong size and the text is overflowing off the side of the document.
Heh! Maybe 14-15 years ago I got my small employer to start using OpenOffice. They couldn’t afford Office licenses for everyone, but it was super handy to give everyone a word processor.
One time we were having a hard time exporting Word docs that a customer was able to open and view correctly. After much back and forth, it turned out they were also using OpenOffice and it was having trouble opening the emulated Word docs we sent. We cut out the middle man and started sending them OOo’s own native docs. Problem solved!
I know that’s far from the common case, but it made me so happy at the time.
> It doesn't work when you're required to submit MS Office documents to people who pay you.
Microsoft office supports ODT these days... you can tell them to "just open it in Office" and it will work.
Also, the LibreOffice DOCX export filter is pretty good. Not perfect, but then, if you need that perfection, why not submit a PDF?
---
And finally: To help LibreOffice (and its filters) improve, we need to contribute either money or development time: www.libreoffice.org/donate
Do a power move: Convert the document to an iWork Pages file, and send them that.
> Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.
I feel exactly the same way about that. And I often use it for stuff I don't need to collaborate on. But for paid jobs with stuff I need to round-trip with people who I know are using Microsoft products, I just use the Microsoft products myself.
It's cheap insurance against giving the people who are paying me to collaborate with them a bad experience.
I have used OnlyOffice for my collaborative writing needs the last year, and it has been great. They offer a free hosted version, everything is open source and it can be self-hosted.
I can invite people in with SSO so they do not need to make yet another account.
For most professionals Excel alone carries 99% of the worth of an O365 subscription.
I would give anything for a standalone, offline spreadsheet software as robust and powerful as Excel. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist.
Office still exists as a standalone version.
I am not a power user by any means. In fact I use Word and Excel maybe no more than 5 times a year for both professional and personal use. Yet I quickly run into things that are not well supported in other word processor/spreadsheet applications and need to go back to Office.
I use a free office suite at home because I don't want to pay $99/year to edit resumes and the occasional other document.
It works, but its clunky, you have font shenanigans, it just overall feels weird and not smooth...
Then again, I'm one of the people who would force you to pry Office 2003 (the last version before the ribbon) out of my cold, dead hands.
Currently next to the send button in one of my Teams chats are the suggested responses: "I look forward to it", "Haha, no problem" and "Haha, I know".
I assume some sort of AI is involved, but I not sure who would ever want to say such things, and my great fear is that one day my motor skills will let me down and I click one of these inane buttons.
I've sent the suggestion (many times) that they put in an option to let me turn this off, but they obviously haven't got around to this one yet. So I don't think that we can expect the opt-out options suggested by the article any time soon.
If you're talking about the mobile app I turned those off as soon as they showed up in the settings (click on your profile picture) under [messaging -> show predictions].
Feels like madness to get rid of the Office brand, such a strong name and brand, like Twitter or iPhone. Office must be worth billions in brand recognition. Ingoring everything else, that alone feels like a mistake.
You don't need brand recognition when you have market capture. Microsoft can murder a small puppy every time you buy Office and send you a photo, and you will still pay them because what else will you do.
See how good the brand is, you called it Office :) that doesn't exist any more.
But what consequences will a really large company face for such a prominent disaster? They got what they wanted, which is an excuse to force everyone into paying for new AI products through price increases forced into enterprise contract renewals. It is the same thing that Google just did with Google Workspace or Google Apps or whatever their office suite is called now, where everyone is forced to pay for their new Gemini AI features even if they don’t want it.
The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit. They are achieving that, so for them this isn’t a disaster. They are doing that through illegal bundling, and preventing anyone else from competing for the same revenue fairly. To me that is the real disaster, because it is undermining the startup ecosystem.
The startup ecosystem in which the goal is to get bought to be killed by the monopolies would help us how anyway?
My point was that any deserving and more helpful product that is not from Microsoft or Google will not see any revenue because customers are already being forced to pay for Microsoft or Google’s AI products.
We did an enterprise license renewal with them last summer. They offered and we accepted a purchase of a large block of m364 license in exchange for a substantial discount in the overall price. Worked for us, worked for them, so no complaints there. We are measuring engagement and time-savings per user and we are doing pretty good on the engagement side while time savings side is barely breaking even (comparing the price of the product versus monetary value of the time saved per user on a monthly basis).
Is m364 the same as m365 but without AI? What is the SKU?
As far as I can tell, they didn’t do this price increase on the business/enterprise SKUs at all. Copilot is still an add on for any of the integration with Office.
(Something the UI reminds you of if you’re on a business plan without it, if you click the button it offers to request a license from your admin unless they remembered to turn that off.)
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> The goal of these companies is to increase revenue and profit.
Unfortunately, it's much worse - logically, such stunts are detrimental to revenue in the long term if they lead to loss of customer confidence. But they don't care about that, they are doing this to hype up and remove legitimate skepticism for "AI" products among the investor class and solidify the bubble.
AI is the next big thing suckers, look how all of our customers are using it. WDYM we "forced" it on them, just shut up and buy MSFT
You should have seen the great deal I got on LibreOffice from TDF!
> Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division.
It's always this surprisingly mundane decision behind every fuckup.
Just pump up numbers this quarter, the evident crash in user confidence and subsequent revenues is the next sucker's problem.
Microsoft still hasn’t figured out desktop search. Of course o365 Copilot is a disaster.
Amen
Microsoft can't even make Teams pleasant and bugfree to use; it's unreasonable to expect them to make a compelling AI product.
But people (who have never used any non-microsoft communication software) are always telling me that Teams isn’t so bad.
Never underestimate the docile nature of a captive audience.
Cancelled immediately after getting the email. I bought a pair of Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20 each for myself and my wife within the hour
>> Office 2024 Professional Plus from a key reseller for £20
Is this key authentic? Which reseller is this?
These are from volume licenses. Not really legal but it mostly works in practice. In some cases the buyer gets unlucky and the volume key gets revoked due to too many activations, but either the seller will give you a replacement key, or it's just another few bucks for a new key.
What is a good way to check to ensure we are not being handed a key that will get revoked
Even in our markets, we have office licenses available on Amazon for all prices ...the cheapest ones looking very suspect but not so sure about the ones that cost a decent amount.
Way beyond my skills to say. I just use a reseller who’s been around for years and has decent trust pilot reviews. I wouldn’t use Amazon though!
CJS CD Keys. I used them before years ago for Visio 2019 and windows 10 pro. Both still purring away nicely
Might as well buy a used Office 2010 CD with the original key/packaging if you’re at it. The icons are all what’s changed since from a home user perspective.
Consider Microsoft Activation Script, also available for Mac Office.
This. It's no more of a license violation than getting a key from some shady reseller, but avoids having to pay or deal with said resellers.
Only ever used it for activating Windows, mind, but that works perfectly. Microsoft are clearly aware of this and don't care.
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Has anyone considered that Copilot doesn't need to be good, it just needs to justify collecting your data?
Yeah, add some fine print and to hell with the end-users!
To avoid 365 Copilot you have to downgrade to "Classic": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVPThx7yss
I currently have a 365 Family plan, but have never used any of the family features. Wanted to downgrade to a 365 Personal Classic plan, but that option is not available. Spent an hour waiting for Microsoft Support to help. Nice gentleman on the other side of the chat window directed me to Business Sales and closed the chat.
So I just cancelled outright.
Thanks, just did this. Hecking fraudsters @ M$
Day 1357 watching Microsoft not give a fuck about their customers, thankfully I was not brainwashed into being their product from the childhood.
So you are using Google or what? I feel like in Enterprise Environments you don't have much choice between bad and worse.
I can't really fully understand what "Microsoft 365" stands for. Microsoft years in day? Microsoft all year? hard to understand. Sounds like some kind of new super-term for their Office products. In that case, LibreOffice works absolutely fine inside my company. Element works alright for secure e2ee messaging. For storage and document collaboration we are using a self-hosted Nextcloud cluster. All of these solutions are free and have no upfront fee, but they have some maintenance costs of course, yet I think they are magnitudes lower that M$ could scam us for. The AI tooling you can definitely integrate in the workflow yourself if you need them (we don't). As non-us company inside security field, we have little trust towards microsoft to store the sensitive data on their cloud services, and generally the amount of measures taken against corporate espionage is higher – communications are taken through verified and trusted e2ee mediums, and it's common to host enterprise infrastructure on-premises – it's totally realistic to have your company data and communications never leave your virtual private network, and it's a good practice to do so in my opinion.
… except that Google took this as permission to make their previously optional AI bolt-on mandatory and hiked the price for every user in exactly the same way.
Complaining to their support was an utterly miserable fruitless exercise that has me wondering what alternatives there are to this madness for SMEs…
One of the problems I see with the 365 suite, is that most users’ ratio of consume:produce is pretty high. IOW, they use it to view the content authored on it. They might author the occasional document, but they’ll view +10x that many. This makes a one size fits all pricing difficult.
What really cracked me is this: https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/d54d9bed01a08fc8e71b25e7f...
The AI asking what you are going to do with that extra revenue xD
Recent and related:
Microsoft just renamed Office to Microsoft 365 Copilot on Windows for everyone - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42751726 - Jan 2025 (47 comments)
You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42640180 - Jan 2025 (250 comments)
It is an interesting data point that two large companies (MSFT and AAPL) have both failed to properly implement AI tooling within their ecosystem. In MSFT case it is such a terrible experience as a end user, especially in MacOS. I don't even think its an issue with the LLM themself or the engineering talent but a complete lack of talent at the product level. I have never used the capabilities they have built (they are bad implementations) and on top of that the UI is so in your face that it is pathetic. In MacOS Outlook they have a quarter inch sized bar in the main UI with just a button to summarize. It is so bad.
Pushing undesirable features and products on users like that always ends badly. Pushing AI onto users that use those products for legally protected data is a supremely bad idea. I'll be surprised if they don't get sued.
Meanwhile, I got a spam popup about Gemini when logging into a google workspace. I found the button to activate it in the workspace chat and it told me "Gemini in chat is not available".
Deployment looks as great as Microsoft's so far?
There are a bunch of education users that are really pissed off because they don't want kids learning to read and write to be "assisted" by badly implemented AI "features".
But there's (AFAIK) no GPO to turn Copilot off in the apps.
This is fantastic news for LibreOffice ;)
Just make the full move to Linux already. The water’s fine.
An interesting note on the making a PowerPoint out of a folder of pictures. That isn't a task. It's a few non-obvious button clicks but it'll just make each slide a picture. Used to use it for my grandfather's travels. Just in case anyone thought they needed a LAM or whatever for that.
For those just skimming the article and who haven't heard, as an existing subscriber to Microsoft 365, you can switch to the Classic variant without AI and without the price increase, by clicking on "Cancel subscription" on your account page and selecting Classic.
...at least for now...
This doesn't even work well. It was still listing the old price for my renewal on Feb 1, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't billed more, so I clicked on "Cancel subscription", and didn't see any option for Classic, so I clicked the "I don't want my subscription" button, figuring that the option was behind that... and it cancelled my entire subscription. Resubscribing then only gave me the option to subscribe at the new +30% price rate.
Had to spend two hours with MS support to get them to cancel my subscription again and actually get me onto the Classic plan. I lost two weeks of my plan that I'd previously paid for, without recompense, and they warned that the Classic plan was a one-time transition thing, so by that measure I'm also out an entire year of the Classic plan compared to if I'd renewed at the old rate on Feb 1, 2025, and then switched to my year of Classic for my Feb 1, 2026 renewal. Also kicked my entire family of their shared plans so had to re-invite and subscribe them all.
I don't even care about the Office apps, all I really care about is OneDrive, but there aren't any great alternatives for that... e.g. Dropbox Family is nearly double the price of 365 Family.
Upvoted because it's an actually helpful comment -- I've just downgraded mine to classic. I dont need to pay for several AI subscriptions -- they all do the same thing.
Based on the fact of them using a dark pattern to hide a subscription tier, and effectively hiding the one that they're claiming to no longer exist hence the price increase would have me cancel out of principle.
Everything at home is OSS, I switched to OSS everywhere in 2000. I love reading these news, gives me a chuckle.
At work, everything is Microsoft, Copilot 365 and everything. Gives me a headache using it. And a chuckle seeing IT struggle with disgruntled users…
Same! It blows my mind how much our company spends on this shit. And how oblivious our IT department is to anything non-Windows.
Dear Microsoft, if you try to force it on me, I am not going to use it. In fact, I will ignore it altogether. The same goes for any of the features in Windows that are turned on without my permission.
The AI assistant for Office 365 is confusing, e.g., the "light bulb" feature in meetings/calendars adds random OneDrive references. This can be dangerous, as it might be mistaken for attached documents, leading to misunderstandings between the people in the meeting. Such features should be OFF by default and enabled selectively, allowing users granular control over their impact.
The author touched on the multiple accounts problem in the article.
I don't use MS products but some of my clients do and when I get an account on their system, it's always been a hassle to set things up. It remembers old accounts which i can't delete, Random error 500s, Teams doesn't work in the browser, and several paper cuts which has made me dread the idea of logging in into any MS account.
I have not used Office for years, but I still can't imagine using anything else to write a document if I ever need to.
Serious question: what is the last version of Office (or Office for Mac) that I can purchase that doesn't include AI features? Are there 202x versions still available that will never be updated with AI features?
It might be the last piece of Microsoft software I purchase for a good decade.
Microsoft still sells boxed versions. Pretty sure those don't have any online connectivity requirements.
As I mentioned in another comment, don't buy, just use Microsoft Activation Script, then you can choose whichever AI-free version you prefer.
Good point: I still cannot use CoPilot. I frequently try to figure out if MS365 Business accounts in the US have copilot yet. I used it for my family account and dont see any availability to use Copilot in that software either.
So far this launch has not worked out right.
I subscribed for a trial month because I had a lengthy word document which was bilingual in a side by side table. I wanted it to fill maybe 20 trivial items which needed to be put in several obvious places.
Oh boy! It couldn't do anything except append to the end of the document. It couldn't create tables! It couldn't search and replace! It couldn't maintain formatting.
What a failure!
Aren't all Microsoft launches disasters?
At least the one where they tried to demo some voice recognition and it went pear-shaped, must have been some twenty years ago.
PS: 2006 https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/29/1258212/vista-speech-rec...
This is why, short of real financial hardship, I will never work again at a company where I need to rely on Microsoft products.
Have to use Windows as an OS? No thanks. Microsoft Teams as core employee platform? Nope.
I get it’s not a choice for many.
If you find a place, hit me up.
Very tired of the popular “productivity” suites, I moved my entire company to Googles last year (which was as painful as you can imagine) and now they’re springing Gemini on us, which is less terrible, but we’ll be paying for the pleasure.
I was pleasantly surprised how well WSL works under Windows 10. Unfortunately, it is also considered a security threat, because corporations don't like users having effective root on their machines.
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>Microsoft is halfway through its 2026 fiscal year. It's almost like someone was given instructions at the end of the calendar year to bump up that revenue line for the Office Consumer division.
2026?
When Microsoft decided to advance straight to Windows 10 from 8, it also necessitated skipping the 2015 fiscal year. They have been stuck a year in the future ever since.
It's time to reinstall Office 2010, the last known good 64-bit version of Office.
And yet you'll have a ton of people tell you everything since 2007 has just been terrible and completely unusable and unfit for purpose. Others will tell you Office 2003 was massively bloated and used way more RAM than necessary and had way too slow startup times.
On an alternative opinion maybe, Microsoft seems to have survived so many such "disasters", that one start to question maybe they are not as disastrous as they are portrayed to be?
Putting Microsoft completely apart, what make you think that there is strong correlation between survival span and the amount of disaster that some human organization can engender?
I'm in Australia and didn't get the automatic option to "downgrade" to what I already had.
I got on the online chat and they were able to do it. Took an hour of them faffing around to get it to happen.
Report it to the ACCC as well, the more complaints they get the more likely they'll take up the issue.
How has MS broken any of Australia's competition laws/regulations here? They put up the price on their product and (theoretically) "added value" to justify it.
They didn't/don't have to offer "Classic" but they do. They make you jump through hoops to get it. That's not stuff that ACCC will do something about.
They should have made it something we wanted. Crazy thing is a year ago I wanted to pay for it but I had to have a business plan and pay annual instead of monthly. They really missed an opportunity there because I would have paid.
Worse than CoPilot is the new Notepad.
Can close the program without saving the file, open it again and it is still there! WTF?
This is the default behavior of Notepad++, and is quite useful.
There are times I want a scratch file to stick around without saving it to disk (I know it's still saved to disk somewhere, but that's not the point).
The answer is to close the file you don't want to stick around.
> This is the default behavior
Also for MacOS TextEdit and Preview (can edit images a bit).
It's convenient, I just have to pre-save the original on case I'm experimenting and not versioning.
Sublime Text and VS Code both do the same thing. I can imagine that it takes a bit to get used to, assuming that you'd even want to, but I've found it to be very handy: At this point in time 6 unsaved text documents open in Sublime Text, covering a variety of subjects that I haven't quite finished working on, or that I just want to remember for later
IMO, that is encouraging a very bad habit.
How so? None of this would more than mildly inconvenience me if it were lost. Important notes/files are of course saved in appropriate locations, but a lot things aren't that important
If you get used to it for some cases, it becomes harder to remember in instances that do not autosave!
Just my opinion though.
The default editor in Ubuntu, presumably just the default gnome text editor, is the same. I struggled to get rid of a scratchpad of notes once. Really weird and unexpected and I'm sure it gets people in trouble occasionally.
That's why my go-to way of closing that editor has become Ctrl+W+Q (add more W if more than one tab is open in the editor).
I do the same in Sublime and VScode. I believe both ask you to save when exiting, but in a forced exit or reboot both restore the complete session including unsaved files and unsaved edits.
My work laptop as 64 gigs of RAM and the latest processor. It is admittedly the most high-spec work laptop I have ever used. Unfortunately it has Windows 11, which means it runs slower than a crappy Windows XP laptop from 2005.
Surprisingly, I’ve figured my Windows 2000 ThinkPad with Word 2000 does 90% of what I need (apart from docx and live sharing) and does it noticably faster than my Windows 11 ThinkPad with Word 2024.
It's not that long ago that there was all the hullabaloo about Notepad being updated for the first time in years, to support Unix line endings. Now it has been replaced wholesale with a slow app that crashes.
It's so weird that Notepad has been enshittified with AI and Bing search (!) but they haven't bothered updating WordPad.
Even more basic than that, it has some bizarre behavior regarding selections: pressing Shift+End selects to the end of line including the EOL, such that pressing Backspace will then splice the line. No other text editor I've used does this, and it's annoying.
FWIW, I like that a lot in my text editors.
I've uninstalled new Notepad and switched to a third party app for this reason. The point of notepad.exe is it's the same thing as ever was.
This is the default for modern Mac apps since several years. So I guess it’s Microsoft catching up to this new norm?
How do they still have money? Their primo offerings can be readily substituted with FOSS since decades, and at this point the libreoffice experience is better.
Id' say it's a combination of:
1. The effect of being the closest-to-reach solution on MS Windows. 2. Organizational inertia. 3. MS Office' use of OOXML is convoluted and difficult to replicate/reverse engineer, making it difficult to perfectly export to and import from it. 4. Fear, uncertainty and doubt about ditching MS Office. Nobody ever got fired for paying for Microsoft Office. 5. MS marketing
Does this allow Micro$oft to train their AIs on your word documents?
Ai is new and this justified them to move fast and break things, including user privacy. The amount of money they target to make minus the slap on the wrist will still be a monumental profit. Then they'll try to clean up house and play PR theater.
Is it worse than apple intelligence butchering news summaries though?
Much. I love the Apple summaries. Even the wrong ones provide context.
Message from Spooky23: says they like eating apples
LOL.
It is.
I have colleagues who used Copilot for generating slides in PowerPoint. Copilot created slides that are completely unrelated to the prompt.
Apple Intelligence is horrible and hallucinates a ton, but at least it spits out nonsense on the same topic.
It's a wash.
Google also did something like this to people with Business Standard Workspace licenses (i.e. the ones who signed up for Google for Domains and got bamboozled into an enterprise offering that limited Google functionality quite noticeably...but that's a topic for another post).
Two weeks ago, we were notified that our accounts had licenses Gemini for Enterprise enabled by default, at no extra cost. With that change came an absolute walloping of AI nudges in Gmail, Calendar and Drive apps.
The only way to turn it off was to contact support so they could enable two hidden checkboxes in the Admin panel that turn off Gemini for good.
Note that any users in a Google Workspace tenant can still enable Gemini outside of the org somehow. Upgrading to Enterprise licenses _might_ prevent this "feature."
I hate this timeline in tech.
Cancelled my subscription immediately - went back to my lifetime 2021 edition. Haven’t noticed anything different.
Clippy's reincarnation seems a bit... extreme.
I don't even know what Copilot is anymore. Typical Microsoft bullshit. It started off as an MS copy of ChatGPT which was really good, especially as ChatGPT bans Hong Kong because China boo boo bad and all that dumb shit. But now suddenly it's an AI version of Siri, giving short responses to questions. Why? I stopped bothering with it
Once again, a huge tech company trying to make its users want a feature they don't need because management decided it's the buzzword 'strategic priority' they need to sell.
The interesting thing is that they do not own copilot.com
no one wants or need copilot.
The shocking thing about this article is that people still give Microsoft money for software
I mean, the ONE thing I want is when I am writing an email to coordinate a meeting and it says "how about tomorrow at 1:00" in the email body, that I can reply with a meeting and the time is set for tomorrow at 1:00 automatically?
Surely we can do this MSFT???? The most basic AI help please, thank you.
No one asked for AI integration anywhere. But still we are fed with that shit.
When CoPilot showed up in my Word, I was writing a pitch doc that asked me to also describe whether I was using GenAI for anything for this pitch. It made me realize I didn’t know whether this doc was getting auto-pushed to CoPilot and would be used for training in some way. Dislike.
fyi, it's "Copilot"
Microsoft is evidentially bad at all forms of naming -- I have it on good authority that even (some) of their sales people think so (and will discretely admit to it).
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I don't think Microsoft has created a single novel or useful thing in the last 30 years, with the exception of vscode.
I dont like windows these days but I still think they have made several useful things in the last 30 years:
C#/.NET Windows 95 Windows 2000 Windows XP WSL SQL server
for a start.
I'll credit them for Windows NT, that was a solid system ( though developed mainly by ex-DEC staff ).
SQL Server was originally licensed from Sybase.
Power Query, Powershell, and .net core were revolutionary in their niches.
You mean Microsoft Atom? Jokes aside, a lot of the platform security work (VBS/ the secure kernel) is pretty novel
They've fixed their CMD app. 5 years ago, to enlarge the window, you had to tweak how many rows/columns you want to show, tweak with those until you have the desired window size. Now you can just resize like you would on any other app
I like PowerShell :)
Encarta 95 with mindmaze 95, spider solitaire?
Windows 2000 was pretty revolutionary
It was a security nightmare, but it was so close to what we're still using today it's not even funny.
Compared to 9x? Sure, but it’s not like it was born in a vacuum. Compared to NT 4? Not really, I think. There were significant new things (MMC, Windows Installer, a first-party USB stack). I think there was a grand total of one headline new feature for developers (COM+, a continuation of MTS, a non-partition-tolerant distributed transactions thing). It’s not nothing, surely, but I don’t really see anything that deserves being called “revolutionary”.
As an oldtimer, when Redhat 9 came out at the same time as Windows 2000, Windows 2000 was ridiculously far ahead. Many engineers switched back to Linux from Windows for a while.
25 years*
NT4 then?
WSL is a big improvement over the MinGW era
Singling out "you can now pretend your Windows is a reasonable facsimile of a Linux" as an example of innovation is not really a flex.
But it's "a useful thing" from Microsoft.
Let's go 20.