At the start of the New Year, with no warning, Microsoft gives its flagship productivity app a name change and a huge price increase. Why would the company make this mess? I asked Copilot, who explained it very well.

  • jol
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    1 day ago

    Just goes to prove even with infinite money you can build successful software. It’s been a long time since MS created software that people love. The only current exceptions I can think of are not consumer products, but developer products: vscode and typescript.

    • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
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      20 hours ago

      A kind reminder that neither MS DOS, Age of Empires, excel or powerpoint where made by Microsoft but bought to steer them from the competition.

    • kippinitreal@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      infinite money you *can’t build successful software

      Typo?

      If so, that’s a good point! Though vscode source is open & so is typescript. With community input it evolves into what the community wants, not what the sales teams understand consumers want… or want them to want lol.

      • jol
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        19 hours ago

        Yes. I don’t know why, but I make this typo so often. I think my keyboard sometimes auto corrects can’t to can.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      21 hours ago

      Debloated and castrated W10 is not as shitty as older systems if you look at it now, PowerShell is kinda neat and useful, standalone Office apps are slowly getting better and the corruption of their interfaces happened more than a decade ago in Vista times. I like Win+Shift+S screenshot shortcut, Win+arrow movement of windows, middle-mouse scrolling that I can’t correctly emulate on Linux. Their driver storage and search made plug-n-play less of a joke than it was before, like 50% of the time you don’t even need to look for drivers. Your fresh installation media usb stick can also serve for in-place update if you click its’ Setup.exe while booted, and it helped me to unfuck a lot of borked systems. All of these come wirh a lot of shit, but, like, w10 era before co-pilot was a golden age for Win PCs, and it also brought a shared subscription between their xbox consoles and pcs. And if they worked on top of that, improved it, I could’ve stayed there. But they did everything to make me switch to Linux, and with further downgrades, ads and neuro-bullshit I’m happy I got the best MS did and wasn’t there to experience their products at their worst.

      • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz
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        18 hours ago

        I was a loyal Windows user for nearly 30 years and they pushed me to Linux, too. The upside is that Linux is really great.

      • jol
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        19 hours ago

        They are allergic to anything that is working well.