Office 97 and Windows XP was something of a high point in personal computing. The internet has enabled entirely new product categories, but it has also badly eroded old ones with the solvent of MRR greed. Merely selling a thing just ain't good enough, especially if it's software. Even offline applications are SaaS, now, where the "service" are frequent updates that leave you at the perennial mercy of every company from which you purchase software (and every company with which they do business, recursively). I'm normally pretty sanguine about business models, but when I lay it out like this, I find it quite disturbing.
2 years ago I decided to fire up my Pentium#100 and write a technical plan on it using Office 2000, for my real life corporate job. It worked magnificently, no fuss, plan presentation went fine. Faster on a 100mhz machine with 16MB ram than whatever monstrosity underlies O365 and Google Docs.
I'll happily use an old Office, just please splice in the "What do you want to do?" search bar so I don't have to hunt through nested menus/ribbons for some obscure formatting option I use once every 6 months.
LibreOffice is actually pretty great, it's not "run on a Pentium 100 MHz" fast but it's stable and works well for basic office spreadsheet/word processing/powerpoint tasks.
It works well until you need to send and receive documents from MS Office organizations. LibreOffice mangles layouts and formatting in DOCX and PPTX files.
The UX is mighty rough. Last I worked heavily on Calc it wasn't terribly compatible with other spreadsheet software like gnumeric, though perhaps that has changed.
In my view, the ribbon was an incredible UX innovation; I just resent Microsoft for patenting it. A ribbon could improve so much software. Don't forget that cascading menus are an antipattern.
What's not to like? Common functions are one click away, and others are two clicks away. Are you saying lengthy drop-down menus were better? I don't see how.
I haven't used office in a while, but I remember that once a function wasn't in the "home" ribbon, finding it required searching through the other sections. And the division of those sections was super counterintuitive for me. Whereas I could usually hazard a pretty good guess where something would be in the drop-downs.
Well I used to read a list of options horizontally, then click one and read a list of options vertically. Now, with the ribbon, I must observe a grid of different sized and shaped objects. That's harder to parse, in my opinion.
Except for one: Ashton-Tate Framework. "Emacs for business" gets you within a stone's throw of how flexible and powerful Framework was back in the day. Of course its UI wouldn't fly in today's world, but back then (early 80s) it was a revelation.
You just installed it locally off a disc and it just worked when you needed it. You didn’t even need internet.