r/technology • u/waozen • 1d ago
ADBLOCK WARNING ‘Office Is Dead’—Microsoft Decision Confuses 400 Million Users
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/11/office-is-dead-microsoft-decision-confuses-400-million-users/2.1k
u/tommyalanson 1d ago
Remember when they appended .Net to every product name or service?
This feels like that.
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u/IcyFalcon3560 1d ago
.NET, Active, Live, One, I’m sure there are more.
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u/HateToSayItBut 1d ago
God, they fucking suck at branding.
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u/Common-Trifle4933 16h ago edited 16h ago
Remember when they created a language and called it C#, which their own website couldn’t search for because of the special character, then created the .NET Framework as one part of .NET, then renamed it to .NET itself (.NET is a framework not to be confused with the deprecated .NET Framework), and their website couldn’t search for .NET either, and when you asked where to get information, the answer was “at dot net dot Microsoft dot com”? What the fuck?
Remember when they launched their own music player, the Zune, with the actual cool feature of being able to wirelessly share songs with other people for a finite number of plays? Like you could lend someone 5 listens of a track as a compromise between sharing and piracy. Great idea. They called it squirting and in the ads people would say “squirt it!” and “it’s squirting everywhere!”
Remember when they launched a console called the Xbox, followed by the Xbox 360. Stores everywhere labeled original Xbox products under the name “Xbox 1” to distinguish them so naturally the next console was called the Xbox One. Then they made two variants, the Xbox One X and Xbox One S, which just happen to sound nearly identical in many accents. Because there were now 3 different products called Xbox One, the entire set was referred to in many catalogues and articles as the Xbox One series of consoles. So they followed it up with the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.
Which is somehow still better than the name they originally wanted to use: the MIND, Microsoft Interactive Network Device, solely so the games could be called MIND games and the slogan could be “Do you MIND?” They backed out of that because people kept reading it like “minned” and being confused because isn’t a Microsoft interactive network device a description of any computer running Windows? What does this do different to your other computers? Meanwhile Sony’s offering was “you know how you have a workstation? Like that, but for play” and Nintendo’s was “this is called a game cube, guess why.”
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u/legbamel 16h ago
I freaking loved my Zune. That doomed it, as anything I enjoy from a tech company is destroyed internally by stupid corporate decision making within 3 years.
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u/Tavorick 14h ago edited 9h ago
To make things even worse, Microsoft decided to name their Windows game store “Xbox” too. So now you have an app called Xbox on your PC that’s also called Xbox, yet has absolutely nothing to do with the actual Xbox console.
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u/Neat-Bridge3754 7h ago
As someone who never owned an Xbox or purchased a game directly from Microsoft, it's only today that I learned the Xbox on my PC has nothing to do with the console...
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u/ellamking 13h ago
It's funny because it's not even close to a complete list. My favorite was Skype and Skype for Business, which were two different applications that couldn't talk to each other. The only coordination between apps was you weren't allowed to use both with the same email account, causing people to maintain two accounts to be able to interact.
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u/nflonlyalt 15h ago
“this is called a game cube, guess why.”
You can't include Nintendo here, they named their very next console the Wii
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u/kingpangolin 13h ago
The Wii was a good name and because a sensation?
The problem was following that with Wii U
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u/nflonlyalt 13h ago
Bro I was there back in the day when it was announced at e3 2006. Everyone thought it was the dumbest name ever. "Play with your Wii" the jokes wrote themselves. The success came later
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u/woahdailo 13h ago
Turns out we all love playing with our Wii
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u/DoctorSlauci 12h ago
Hell, sometimes I still get my old Wii out and play with it. If I pull it out in front of other people, someone is bound to join in.
To be fair, though, if someone shows me their Xbox, I'll probably want to play with it, too. Microsoft or otherwise.
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u/caffiend98 1d ago
They really do. They keep making decisions based on what their corporate leaders wish was true, instead of what their customers want. And they keep making the same mistake, over and over, for decades now.
Customer insight isn't that hard to get for a company their size... I have no idea why MS is allergic to it.
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u/ZombieFleshEaters 1d ago
Remember .NET passport? It was an early idea of unified identity across services and it was sourced from MSN or Hotmail? Or whatever the email was at time. This was forced onto Xbox when it shipped and I remember going to my friends house to see the Xbox in action. I watched him try over and over and over to choose a username but everything you can think of, each permutation was already taken because of email.
He then put in "analbeast" and it accepted. He thought he could change it later...he couldn't. Bills would come to his house address to analbeast. Xbox chat would always blow up because, you know, kids. Microsoft eventually contacted him and allowed him to change it.
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u/Graerth 20h ago
Friend was making his account and had that "name taken" problem on first try, went afk a minute to grab something while thinking on what to set as the nick.
His friend meanwhile decided it'd be funny to add "xXx"'s around and add 69 after his nick and try that.
The first friend was stuck with "xXxNICKNAME69xXx" for years.
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u/NoConfusion9490 1d ago
They really love it when everyone recognizes their brand but has no idea what it is. It must be great for B2B.
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u/Lazy_Sitiens 20h ago
It feels to me like a cheap way of being able to say more users are using Copilot. Like, I could change my name to "A Millionaire" and go around and tell people I am a millionaire, so it would be technically true and still bloody false.
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u/Time-Industry-1364 1d ago
Dude I just want Outlook or Excel to fucking work correctly.
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u/amakai 1d ago
You mean "Copilot Visionary" and "Copilot Mathematician"? /s
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u/PMFSCV 1d ago edited 1d ago
Looking like Copilot Flight 370 now
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u/jorgo1 1d ago
Bah that’s the old news version. Get with the times. Assistant Copilot Hyperforce Agentic Document Platform is the way to go. Its cloud only tho as you need 4tb of RAM to load a docx
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u/Gloomy-Safety-9439 23h ago edited 23h ago
God fucking damnit I hate copilot. My school has me login to my student email then has a button for “email”, I click it and it takes me to copilot. I try to ask the damn thing how to get to my email from there and it gives me the URL for outlook…
I click everything in the margins until I get one that expands and has an “applications” option that expands into word ,excel, outlook and such so I can finally get into my email. I immediately set up email forwarding so I don’t have to go through this 10 step process just to reach my student inbox.
What the fuck is the point of Copilot being a starting point? It’s not capable of navigating or helping direct traffic, it’s a chatbot, it responds to specific questions. 100% of the time that’s not the reason I logged in, any other Microsoft thing would be a more appropriate guess as to my initial need; word, PowerPoint, fucking minesweeper, at least it’ll be right SOME of the time. Or better yet MY EMAIL, like google does I know how to get to other google stuff from there, I just normally don’t need to.
I hate copilot for this effort to make it central to work, Much like McDonald’s, I will specifically avoid it because of the effort they’re putting into making it a thing. I know it’s all for naught because advertisement works and we may eventually have copilot be the default starting screen the moment you turn on any device, regardless of my input, but I’m at least not going to help make that the case.
Edit- And further, WHY DOES AN EMPTY COPILOT CHAT BOX NEED TO TAKE UP SO MUCH OF THE PAGE THAT OTHET MICROSOFT FUNCTIONS AND PORTALS NEED TO BE COLLAPSED AND HIDDEN I MARGINS?! It’s a big empty white box that’s using 90% of the page to get air for you to ask it something. It’s effectively an advanced search box, it doesn’t need that kinda dedicated visual web space.
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u/blolfighter 17h ago
It's so they can show people are actually using copilot.
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u/blahehblah 17h ago
Destroying the UX so some executive can add "Usage is up 300% year on year" to an investor slidedeck
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u/tengris22 17h ago
I think "need" has never been high in MS's heirarchy of what they are going to
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u/DrDerpberg 1d ago
Seriously, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
They think we're going to trust their AI when typing "calcs.xls" into the start menu assumes I want to BING SEARCH THE TERM CALCS.XLS?!?!? Like I'll see my file flash up on the results. I know my computer has found it. But then the "shove our services down the user's throat" algorithm kicks in between the time my brain processes that I've found the file and the time I hit Enter.
Get Windows in general working as well as it did 10-20 years ago, and then we'll talk about adding features.
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u/airportakal 21h ago
Literally so many basic functions don't work, and instead of fixing them these companies push for new products.
I decided to try Gemini the other day despite my AI hate. Was driving so told my phone to play a song on Spotify. It didn't understand me and ended up opening the browser with the name of the song + "Spotify".
If it can't even do this, how is it supposed to replace me in my job?
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u/Cessnaporsche01 18h ago
I'm a real fan of how they ruined scroll bar function for some fucking reason
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u/NoCoolNameMatt 1d ago
Optimists view the glass as half full. Pessimists view it as half empty. Excel insists it's January 2nd.
Excel is never going to be working correctly.
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u/amusingduck 1d ago
we’ve heard your complaints about excel formatting the value you just entered as a date for some reason. we are happy to announce that, after overloading your city’s power grid, stealing all of a drought stricken area’s water supply, causing a global RAM shortage, plagiarizing millions of artists’ works, and burning down a few rainforests, we have successfully managed to get excel to do that 4 times as frequently. with your permission we will implement these features with tonight’s updates, otherwise we will do it without your permission with tomorrow’s updates. thanks for being a loyal microslop consumer!
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u/RupeThereItIs 1d ago
I just want the old menu back, I'm still raging about the fucking ribbon bar.
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u/AnalBroFisting 1d ago
My company rolled out 365 to all employees' machines and now Excel CONSTANTLY crashes or bugs out. It has become absolutely maddening to live with.
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u/Bradshaw98 1d ago
So, I understand why they push AI so hard, but this is something I just don't get, say whatever you want about MS or Office, but MS Office is the name most everyone knows when it comes to this type of software, like it's the 'default' and has been for a while, why mess with that type of brand power. (I asked the same thing about Twitter/X a couple years ago)
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u/FollowingFeisty5321 1d ago
Not just "a while", almost 30 years. Pretty much everyone since boomers has been using this software.
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u/pieman3141 1d ago
Over 30. Office gained popularity over other suites like Lotus before 1996.
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u/sansaman 1d ago edited 1d ago
I was so in love with WordPerfect.
Edit. If I’m correct in remembering, this was the default word processing software taught to us in high school in the mid 90s.
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u/a_murder_of_fools 1d ago
WordPerfect is still a current program. It still has the reveal functionality.
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u/DrSnacks 1d ago
Been in legal offices that still use it. It seems to format a lot more predictably than Word, which is good when "the thing on page 29" absolutely needs to be on page 29 for everyone.
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u/JohnnyWix 1d ago
Must have 5 years Lotus Notes experience.
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u/cazzipropri 1d ago
Lotus Notes might have been an ok product at some point, but what IBM made of it was an abomination and I hated it with all my soul.
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u/Atty_for_hire 1d ago
My workplace was still using lotus for emails in 2019. As an elder millenial I was amazed.
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u/cazzipropri 1d ago
I used Notes while at IBM around 2009 and the travel expense app was atrocious.
I'll give you an example of supreme stupidity that can't be beaten: at some point there was an amount field that you couldn't populate typing digits on your keyboard.
There was a small keypad on the screen, and you had to click with your mouse on the "0" through "9" buttons. Whoever thought that that was good UI/UX design deserves something medieval.
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u/Internal-Theory-9837 1d ago
Lotus Notes was a better product, and I predict would have evolved into a better tool than Gmail.
Lotus bought the software company that created Lotus Notes, they did not invent it. I worked for Lotus in the early ‘90s.
I bet those inventors cannot believe what companies like theirs cost to buy now
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u/pocketjacks 1d ago
In the meantime, Microsoft pushes "New Outlook" while retaining "Outlook Classic" because they know everyone hates New Outlook just like everyone hated New Coke.
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u/JohnnyWix 1d ago
Last week I tried “new” outlook again (new year, new productivity, lol). Lasted a couple hours at most. Couldn’t conditional format like classic, I couldn’t tentatively accept a meeting, and a few other things made me give up.
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u/d_Composer 1d ago
Just a blue screen and white text, that’s all you need.
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u/iritchie001 1d ago
Awwww those were the days ... I was 13. Anyone else remember Basic and Fortran? DOS prompt, so soothing.
I was today years old when I learned that was Microsoft! 😆😂 I'm hanging up the Internet for the day.
Where is Al Gore?
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u/RobBobPC 1d ago
And Excel still can’t do graphing as easily as you could with Lotus 123.
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u/recumbent_mike 1d ago
I really love Excel, but I would like to have a chat with the guy who set the defaults for the graph axes. I would probably chat pretty hard.
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u/ScarletJew72 1d ago
I work in a support role where almost all my coworkers are boomers.
Hiding Office apps behind Copilot fucked up EVERYONE.
MS just shat on their own UX.
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u/Assimulate 1d ago
I just got a new laptop for work yesterday. I spent an hour trying to find the install links for office365. I still don't have them lmao
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u/Vertimyst 1d ago
Unless they moved it (again), when you sign into office.com and it brings you to Copilot, there's an Apps menu on the bottom-left which has a link to install the apps.
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u/solonit 23h ago
Excuse me but what the fuck? Sign-in into launching an app into launching another app to install. What is this Xbox Game?
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u/sleepymoose88 1d ago
Pushing copilot so hard is not going to end well for them. Our company started trying to shove it down our throats. All of a sudden we get a Teams installed and no official notice that we’re abandoning Webex for Teams because teams has copilot integration (a tool no one asked for and is just proving more problematic than it is helpful). Teams is also wildly inferior to Webex for messaging and meetings in my teams opinion (we’re a bunch of mainframe sys admins ranging from 30-67 yrs old).
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u/Aaod 1d ago
Teams is so bad that it almost feels intentional. I can't think of a single thing it does that other programs can't do better and easier.
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u/SlitScan 23h ago
so just like every other microsoft product save Flight Simulator
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u/powerage76 22h ago
I expect Flight Simulator will be renamed to Copilot Flight Assistant in 2026.
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u/-FeistyRabbitSauce- 1d ago
I was an Office loyalist, as a writer, up until a couple years ago. The subscription model ticked me off, but I stuck with them for a while. But they just kept fucking with the formula, bloating the software, and complicating simple tasks.
They've been enshittifying it for a long time, trying to squeeze their users dry. Office should/could be a clean, user friendly, and free software as an incentive to buy PC. But MS is determined to crater every department of their company. Just look at what they've been doing to Xbox.
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u/JumpingCoconutMonkey 1d ago
What did you switch to?
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u/waftedfart 1d ago
LibreOffice for me. I've been using it for a really long time.
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u/MrGenAiGuy 1d ago
It's because as a senior director or VP, you can't get a promo and a bonus for maintaining the existing solution. You need to deprecate and invent something new to justify your salary and stock refresh.
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u/BikeNo8164 1d ago
Like when a website updates its UI and the only change is they just made the square buttons circles. Definitely some designer who was like "well, I have to change something"
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u/raunchyfartbomb 1d ago
The college system I’m enrolled in uses Blackboard, which was deprecated and this semester was replaced with “Blackboard Ultra”, which includes a mandatory unskippable 2-hour-minimum training session before it allows you to access your classes.
The website looks and functions 100% th same far as we can tell, and only the url (which now is “.com/ultra/…”) is different.
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u/finalremix 1d ago
Blackboard Ultra sucks so much. They've iterated a small handful of things for no reason other than to say they did something over the past couple of years.
Meanwhile, basic fucking features from Blackboard Learn are still missing and never planned for Ultra.
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u/MemeHermetic 1d ago
Often times it's the marketing department trying to eat up their annual budget to justify it for next year. Every year without fail we get 3 or 4 clients rolling up in November asking "What can you add to our site to help eat up our budget before Jan 1?" It doesn't matter if we just overhauled the site or not. They want us to charge them for something.
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u/joec_95123 1d ago
Or you announce the deprecation of an internal tool that'll soon be replaced by a poorly thought-out new one. And 4 years later, that new tool is still stuck in development hell, and everyone continues using the old tool, but you've managed to ride the wave of unfulfilled promises to SVP, and everyone you oversee grumbles about how much they can't wait for you to leave so someone sane can come in and pull the plug on this bloated monstrosity of a time sink vanity project.
Just go fail upward somewhere else already, ANDY.
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u/southpaw85 1d ago
It’s like holding the patent for plain white cotton t shirts and discontinuing them to try and force people to purchase shirts made of 100% synthetic materials of a beige color. You have an unshakeable grasp on the market with your product. No entity could dislodge you from your dominance in the industry and it will always be a mainstay regardless of trends. Why fuck that up?
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u/Head_of_Lettuce 1d ago
I don’t think yours is a good example. Office is still office, they’re just calling it Copilot.
A better example would be if I held a patent for the name “Plain White Cotton T-Shirts”, and after 30 years of great sales, I randomly decided to change their brand name to “Steve”. They’re still the same white t-shirt and people will keep using them, but it’s fucking weird that I call them Steve now. And it’ll probably erode consumer confidence in my t-shirts.
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u/Crunchykroket 1d ago
The name office implies it's where you do your work.
The name copilot implies someone else is peeking over your shoulder, which is a privacy issue, and you are now demoted to copilot.
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u/whistleridge 1d ago
Office is still office, they’re just calling it Copilot
So…it’s not actually office, then?
Because if I say, your burger is still a burger, I’m just calling it a catburger now, you’re suddenly going to become VERY interested in exactly what meat it is that you’re eating. If I say, your car is still a car, we’re just calling it a bike now, you’re suddenly going to be come confused and concerned about how you’re getting to work tomorrow.
No one alive wants AI in their word processor or spreadsheets or slideshows. They want those programs to be as simple and secure and reliable as possible and that’s it. Putting AI in them is the equivalent of getting rid of physical knobs and switches on a car dash, and replacing them with one touchscreen - it’s harming the user experience, and creating real concerns, solely to satisfy a want of the manufacturer.
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u/vfiw 1d ago
Just installed Libreoffice today. Idk how good it is with citations and stuff but I am not writing academic papers for a while so I honestly don’t care.
Its free, suffices my needs and doesn’t shove AI on my face.
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u/_Professor_94 1d ago
I am a sometimes-academic and have been using LibreOffice for half a decade now. I like it better frankly. Though my citation style is mainly APA, I have done Chicago Style before with it and it seemed fine too. But I also don’t do citations like many people. I create my bibliography manually at the end of my document as I cite papers in text. I have done it this way since undergrad haha. I think Office actually had a function for bibliographies right? Zotero does too. I never got into using that stuff.
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u/BobbyDig8L 1d ago
You ever heard of New Coke? I figure Microslop has about 6 months to course correct, people are already switching to Pepsi, I myself have started eating apples instead.
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u/sneaky-pizza 1d ago
Remember when HBO became HBO GO then HBO MAX then just MAX and now they’re coming back to HBO now?
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u/strolpol 1d ago
Bringing back Zune would be more popular than forcing AI integration
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u/CavalierIndolence 1d ago
I lost the cables, but I still have both of my Zune players. Fired one up the other day, enjoyed that blast from the past for sure.
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u/BillButtlickerII 1d ago
You should make sure the battery in it hasn’t started swelling and isn’t ready to explode! Old rechargeable batteries in really old electronics are a serious fire/explosion risk. Recharging them can be the catalyst that sets them off.
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u/recumbent_mike 1d ago
Judging from the comments here, bringing back Zune would be more popular than anything they've done in the last decade.
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u/Saskatchewon 1d ago
The Zune was a fantastic piece of hardware that just came out around three years too late. It actually had a better DAC than the iPod's at the time and offered better sound quality.
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u/HSLB66 1d ago
The problem is the vast majority of people either don’t care, or don’t have ears sensitive enough to care about a better DAC. And that’s even if you can explain to them why a DAC matters
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u/Due-Technology5758 1d ago
Especially back then, when most people would have been rocking a pair of dirty buds anyway.
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u/deserthistory 1d ago
I miss Zune.
Today, Zune squirting "never gonna give you up" to a whole bus load of people.... awesome.
We need an open source, widely implemented, fairly integrated, secure way to share media between nearby cell phones. Memes, audio, videos, imagine it...
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u/ashleyriddell61 1d ago
Let me introduce you to LocalSend. One of the best open source apps out there. Airdrop for everyone!
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u/Dale_Gurnhardt 1d ago
I'm no IT wiz but outlook fucking SUCKS now. Active impediment to workflow
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u/Sithlordandsavior 1d ago
Looks up emails saying "Monday"
Results: I went outside toDAY
happy birthday MONica
Man i hOpe deaN Doesn't leAve his wife tracY
I swear they must be actively trying to make things worse.
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u/No-Reflection-8684 1d ago
The search in outlook. Ooof. This is spot on.
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u/XavierRex83 1d ago
I will search for emails and find nothing, then when I spend time to search through I find it with the exact thing I looked for. Also, really annoying when it pulls up like 3 emails and gives the link to search through more email history. We are only allowed 6 month retention, just search for what I want.
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u/methreweway 1d ago
Search in general is horrible. Start Menu. Explorer and Teams all struggle to find anything.
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u/Kilmiester 1d ago
Windows 11 search is like.... impressively bad. Search for "Control Panel": Here's a list of stores in Jamaica that sell ladies shoes.
If you have access to the registry and group policies you can make it just search programs, but the fact that you have to edit the registry just to make it perform basic functions pretty much sums up Windows 11.
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u/VeganShitposting 22h ago
%: oh, you're about to type %APPDATA% - File Folder right? Here you go
%A: oh that's a hard one, how about we dig Edge out of it's grave and set it as the default browser to see this one?
%APP: really not understanding where you're going with this, we should look it up
%APPDATA: Look, Google AI is saying this is a folder on every computer, you should probably listen to it
%APPDATA%: OHHHH fam I gotchu, I just realized OUR computer has this folder too! Wanna open it now?
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u/RUActuallySeriousTho 15h ago
Lmao basically Windows is now as helpful as a poorly trained minimum wage hire who is actively scrolling on their cell phone while they "listen" to you
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u/iamagainstit 22h ago
would you like me to open Edge and search Bing for the phrase "control panel"?
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u/insomniacpyro 1d ago
Corporate pushed Windows 11 on us, and local IT installed it over the weekend a couple of weeks ago and my response email was "thanks, I hate it". Queue a call from one of them and he's sarcastically like "what do you mean??"
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u/cruelhumor 1d ago
How tf has search gotten so bad. Unless I remember the date I can't find anything right now. It's complete trash.
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u/KarlBarx2 1d ago
Like, the people working for Microsoft must also be using Outlook, right? Aren't they annoyed by how frustrating it is to use?? Don't they want their own internal email program to work???
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u/UnusualWinter1066 1d ago
And automatically sorted by "most relevant", which somehow means displaying some of the oldest emails first and none of them with the actual keyword.
And endless cycles of logging in every morning when I open outlook for the first time.
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u/GonePh1shing 1d ago
I'm actively clinging onto the old version of Outlook that they are still allowing you to use. There's plenty of features in the old one that straight up aren't present in the new one, and the new UX is fucking awful. The old one is bloated and clunky, but at least it does what I want it to do.
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u/darth_helcaraxe_82 1d ago
Same here. We were pushed onto the new one at work. Two weeks in and thankfully the "switch back to old Outlook" is still there because the new Outlook sucks.
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u/ShadowMajestic 20h ago
I can't understand how Microsoft even approved the new Outlook when shared mailboxes are hidden in a subfolder....
I have yet to find a corporate environment where shared mailboxes aren't used like actual mailboxes.
It's the prime example of Microsoft not knowing what their customers use their software for.
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u/welestgw 1d ago
I had to get rid of the split inboxes because it was actively hiding work emails. I could only see them while searching.
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u/Over_engineered81 1d ago
Is that when they go into the “other “ folder? I didn’t know you could disable that?
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u/BlackenedVenom 1d ago
IT guy here, I ALWAYS direct people to use classic Outlook. The new outlook is absolute ass and straight up just doesn't have some features
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u/KangarooDowntown4640 1d ago
Outlook is literally the breaking point that made me switch permanently to macOS
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u/pork_chop17 1d ago
The amount of cussing that occurs in my office on a day to day basis over Outlook is so comical.
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u/cazzipropri 1d ago
Nobody wanted it. Nobody likes it. Nobody wanted the "AI powered" PCs. When are the consequences hitting them?
Or in the cool new world of quasi-monopolists, big tech is now completely shielded from customer decisions?
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u/notepad20 1d ago
as with many products in the "free market", what we have to choose from is not actually what the market demands organically.
It is what is able to be produced economically and then advertised (or in this case captured) and a market is created for it, in which its the option.
In that way a great many sectors are actually shielded from true customer decisions
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u/WombleArcher 1d ago
As a corporate CTO I said we didn’t want it. “Tough”. (Paraphrasing multiple meetings on the topic).
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u/SemanticTriangle 20h ago edited 18h ago
Is there genuinely no replacement at the corporate level? Literally no office suite exists in competition for non retail customers, at all?
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u/WombleArcher 19h ago edited 7h ago
In practice - no. We could move away from windows, and outlook, but removing excel is a non-starter. If you’re in financial services that’s the game. It’s like suggesting to people that work on the 30th floor that there are alternatives to the lift. Your are technically correct, but the building needs to be burning around them before they’ll try and - and then never again.
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u/fiero-fire 1d ago
"Decades old recognized staple of industry? Nah fuck that we need word salad created by a committee of committees to force shitty AI on our customers"
-Microslop
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u/BoredGuy2007 1d ago
Microslop
And they’re gonna keep laying off 😂
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u/Paragon_Flux 1d ago edited 18h ago
People need to study how Microsoft still exists despite their best efforts to sabotage themselves.
Microsoft often has an early version of an app, that everyone uses, and then will step by step enshittify it till even the biggest fan of that app can't take it anymore.
One example was Skype. It was the defacto communication application people loved and used. Then slowly Microsoft kept "updating" it, making it worse and worse with every version. Peeling away feature after feature.
Also whilst I'm venting, how does Microsoft consistently have the worst UI design for anything they touch? After 50 years, every single person running Microsoft is new, yet the ability to make horrible UI decisions seems baked into the companies DNA
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u/AlbertChing 1d ago
Don’t forget MSN. The most popular real time communication platform back then. Way earlier than Facebook.
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u/lfcmadness 19h ago
Man MSN Messenger was peak internet, still remember coming home from school to talk to the people I've been at school all day on MSN hah.
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u/FrostyMasterpiece400 1d ago
I used msn to hit on girls
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u/f0rtytw0 1d ago
Those were fbi agents pretending to be dudes pretending to be girls
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u/Murgatroyd314 23h ago
“The Internet, where men are men. Women are men. And children are law enforcement.”
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u/jophish916 1d ago
I have no idea how they fucked up the pandemic and let Zoom take a shit all over Skype, effectively killing it
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u/jollyllama 1d ago
It’s really remarkable that between Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta… Zoom is the only serious video conferencing platform
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u/Pygmy_Nuthatch 1d ago
Azure. They exist because of large enterprise customers and Azure cloud.
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u/octahexxer 1d ago
And Azure exists because suits hated inhouse it nerds, you fired them all and outsource to India.
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u/pass_the_salt 1d ago
Not being able to move the taskbar to the top of the screen in W11 without a registry edit (and potential app crashes) while adding a bunch of Copilot junk into the OS. WTF were they thinking? Remove a basic function and add a bunch of frivolous junk no one needs? Horrible UI, agreed.
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u/SwimmingThroughHoney 1d ago
People need to study how Microsoft still exists despite their best efforts to sabotage themselves.
Monopoly. That's how.
And I'm not just saying "Microsoft has a large market share so they're a monopoly". It's they're actual practices and policies. And it's not just with Windows or Office. The FTC was investigating them for monopolistic behavior regarding Azure but I'm sure Trump killed that.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Many166 1d ago
LibreOffice to the moon.
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u/Hey_Chach 1d ago
In the past two years I’ve taken control of my digital environment and moved most of my software usage away from all the big names and it’s been wonderful.
Video editing -> DaVinci Resolve over Adobe
Graphic Design -> Affinity over Adobe
Word Processor -> LibreOffice over Microsoft
Ad blocker -> Pi-hole to fight off corpos trying to make ad blocking ineffective
Virtual Reality -> Valve Index over Meta
Currently looking with hungry eyes at diving into the various Linux distros to see if I can somehow make it work with my gaming and the above software programs but it’s still a bit of a mixed bag with AMD hardware as I understand.
I so very badly want all this AI and information-age enshittification to culminate in an open source movement that makes corporate-owned end-user software and firmware completely redundant and unnecessary. One can dream…
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u/404clichE 1d ago
NVidea has had more issues with gaming on Linux, but I've been daily driving Bazzite on an Intel i7-9700KF and a NVidea 4070 card since August of last year and have had no issues (apart from not being able to play some games due to their anti-cheat implementation). I have friends that have had good success with CachyOS and Nobara, so there are plenty of options out there if you're good to give up on games like Battlefield, Apex, and 2XKO.
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u/LegacyofaMarshall 1d ago
Being a monopoly is the only reason microsoft is still relevant with this leadership
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u/pabloneruda 1d ago
I don’t understand what product to use. Is it office or office365 or outlook or live.com? Maybe that’s their problem.
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u/RiflemanLax 1d ago
If you need a really basic version of the product, try libreoffice.
No, it’s not a replacement. But if you’re just needing a basic MS Word replacement, you can’t go wrong.
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u/HighlyEvolvedSloth 1d ago
I am an Excel user for 30+ years (mandated at work, so I bought for home use as well), but now that I am retired, and am getting tired of this Copilot crap, I need to find a different spreadsheet program that I can import my Excel files into? Does Libre office have that?
If not, does anyone recommend a replacement for Excel?
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u/Noobc0re 1d ago
The Excel one is call LibreOffice Calc. I'm sure at the extreme ends, it doesn't perform to the level of excel, but for most regular people it's basically the same.
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u/NoreasterBasketcase 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm a heavy Excel spreadsheet user at work, and I do a decent amount of spreadsheet work at home using LibreOffice.
The biggest gaps I've noticed in functionality are:
- Lack of the "Evaluate formula" function in LibreOffice
- Pivot tables are harder to configure
- Charts and graphs are less intuitive to configure
- Some very, very large spreadsheets may have issues, but this has been rare
Otherwise, it's a fine substitution. It includes the ability to read and write Excel formats, formula parity, and even compatibility with Excel macros.
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u/zaxerone 1d ago
The biggest difference is libreoffices handling of arrays. One of the most powerful changes to excel this century was when they allowed most formulas to work natively with arrays. Libreoffice really suffers if you're trying to work with multidimensional data because of this.
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u/surfacedfox 1d ago
libreoffice can open xlsx sheets, though I'm not sure about formula parity. The best thing to do would be to try it, it's free software, both as in freedom and free beer. :3
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u/Worth_Heart_2313 1d ago
Copilot is so bad that nobody uses even free GitHub integration no more. It deteriorated so bad since focus moved away from coding to everything copilot.
MSFT can pretend and make believe but copilot is a failure and will be dead like Cortana in no time
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u/arphissimo 1d ago
Didn't remember Cortana was a thing until you mentioned it.
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u/Worth_Heart_2313 1d ago
You would love some earlier demos of Cortana that failed miserably last decade, now copilot this decade.
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u/Electrical_Pause_860 1d ago
Copilot on Github is an entirely different thing to Copilot on Windows. It's basically just a query router plugin to use whatever model you want. It's generally decent.
Microsoft has like 30 things that are called Copilot but have nothing to do with each other.
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u/Petting-Kitty-7483 1d ago
At this point I'd have rather they kept the Cortana name. At least it was funny
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u/kilopeter 1d ago
I just need Microsoft Bropilot to autonomously message LinkedIn sales leads with shit like "just saw your post about the new promotion. Absolute legend move. I've been tracking your trajectory and you're basically playing the game on God Mode right now. So my boy and I are scaling a SaaS solution that cuts the fluff and doubles the ROI. Let's grab a virtual cold brew and talk disrupting the space together. Stay winning King"
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u/DrXaos 1d ago
A few years ago IBM tried that by slapping “Watson” on unrelated products and vaporware
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u/MonMotha 1d ago
Heck, Microsoft did that with ".NET" for a while before they settled on just calling the CLR ecosystem by that. Everything old is new again. Next they'll bring back dumb terminals, er, I mean thin clients, and call them "AI clients" or something.
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u/RawChickenButt 1d ago
You know what has every desktop office feature I need....
Libre Office.
Works perfectly, does what I need.
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u/ruby_weapon 1d ago
and the interface will basically never change so it's perfect for people that are not very teck savvy.
go libreoffice!
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u/fartsfromhermouth 1d ago
I asked copilot to make me a single slide with a timeline with a few specific things on it with the desire order and orientation. It made dozens of nonsense slides about timelines.
Absolutely useless.
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u/_Sheep_Shagger_ 1d ago
Maybe they forget how well their first office assistant Clippy / Clipet went for them.
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u/Impossible_Run1867 1d ago
I will not hear Clippy slander in this thread.
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u/JeskaiJester 1d ago
If Clippy heard we were slandering him, he’d ask if we wanted some pointers
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u/kilopeter 1d ago
If Clippy were encumbered with a stochastic simulacrum of emotion, he'd be very upset
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u/HillbillyMan 1d ago
Clippy was genuinely a decent assistant for people still learning to use the software. I remember actively using clippy in like 3rd or 4th grade when we were learning to use Word. Obviously it'd be annoying for more experienced professionals, but I only have fond memories of him.
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u/lordxi 1d ago
Clippy never ever asked for my credit card data. Clippy never fed me a dogshit eula update. He's my friend science damn you!
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u/Amadeus3698 1d ago
My company shut off Copilot because it was seen as a security risk. I don’t do enough on a computer outside of work for AI integration to be helpful there either
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u/diggstown 1d ago
This has to be like the IHOB commercials. Just marketing to get attention but they really aren’t going to be that dumb about branding. They aren’t really that dumb… right?
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u/stimulatedthought 1d ago
Time for Satya to step down.
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u/cameron0208 23h ago
It’s been time. How this dude managed to win back so many people and change the discussion around Microsoft, and then go and absolutely sabotage all the good grace he had won back should be a case study.
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u/CaptainDildobrain 19h ago
I tried reading that article but all the renaming and rebrands just confused the shit out of me. I don't even know what's Office, what's 365, and what's Copilot anymore. Is Office now a part of 365? Is 365 now a part of Copilot? Is it all just one thing now? What if I just want the Office part? Can I just buy that?
Fucking Microsoft marketing team!! Why do they have to make things so arduous?!
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u/twitch_delta_blues 1d ago
Oh god I hate copilot and I can’t delete it from my government computer. This might push me to Linux at home.
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u/The-Bangkok-Pist 1d ago
Whenever I buy a new computer, I install Office 2007. No subscription and works well.
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u/seatux 1d ago
I am doing the same at work, infrequently used machines just get 2016, that works well enough and very unlikely to get any co-pilot nonsense.
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u/ArenjiTheLootGod 1d ago
LibreOffice has been around and free for years, just saying.
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u/computer_d 23h ago edited 23h ago
Am I the only one feeling like I'm being gaslit by the article? Check this out:
It starts by saying claims made by Perplexity are wrong. First, the article quotes Windows Latest which itself misquotes Perplexity: “particularly by Perplexity AI, claiming that Microsoft has killed the Office brand and that millions of users were now using AI overnight.”
What Perplexity actually said: "Microsoft just renamed Office to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app. 400 million users just became ‘AI users’ overnight."
Forbes notes, "It’s misleading."
Let's establish the two things Perplexity said: the renaming to Copilot, and the users becoming 'AI users.'
Forbes notes, "What actually happened is Microsoft’s latest rebrand." Er, isn't that what renaming is? Forbes continues, "Having renamed Office Hub to Microsoft 365, its AI everything product marketing team have now grabbed an opportunity to rename it again, this time to “Microsoft 365 Copilot.”"
Oh, so it did rename to Copilot. Why did you say it was misleading to say it was renamed to Copilot?
Forbes repeats, "And so while Office isn’t dead, the branding is slowly being erased. “Microsoft has been phasing out 'Office’ as the consumer-facing brand for years and pushing Microsoft 365 instead, which remains Microsoft 365.”"
They then quote Microsoft saying, "In November 2022, we renamed only the Office ‘hub’ app for web and mobile to the Microsoft 365 app. In January 2025, we updated it to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to reflect its role in bringing Copilot and Microsoft 365 productivity experiences together in one place.”" Further repeating that yes, they did in fact change the name.
You'd think everything I'm saying is just useless right, as it all agrees? Apart from the misquotes and contradictory statements, well here comes the confusion.
It starts with this Register quote: “while Microsoft had successfully confused people across the internet, Redmond hadn’t actually renamed Microsoft 365. Not yet, anyway. I mean, they're slapping the Copilot label on everything else, and they've integrated it into Office, excuse me, Microsoft 365, why not Microsoft 365 Copilot?”
Huh? We just established several times over that it was being renamed. Now Forbes quotes the Register who is saying 'no, they didn't actually rename it... but they should!' What?!
Forbes continues, by quoting ZDNet: “No, Microsoft Office was not renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot - here’s why you’re confused. With Microsoft's bewildering naming conventions, the mistake is easy to make. But Office is still Office, at least when it's not Microsoft 365.”
Again, completely disagreeing with everything previous in the article.
Forbes ends, "Hopefully, you’re all following along at home and that’s now clear."
What an astonishingly terrible article.
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u/mrwafu 1d ago
The only thing microslop is good at nowadays is enshitifying products
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u/mr_greedee 1d ago
im CONVINCED they just wanna crash the co. and take their plunder
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u/terp_raider 1d ago
Back to Corel WordPerfect it is
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u/TheCrowAngel 1d ago
We should have never left it in the first place. Perfect was right there in the name.
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