They’ve been doing it for so long I’m surprised they have any jobs left to axe.
Sam Palmisano skinned IBM then too a knife to its belly and gutted it. All in the name of his “Roadmap 2010” which was a plan to double the share price by 2015.
So basically the pharaoh said “fuck it, we need a new pyramid. Get the whips out and all worker carcasses are to be dump on the left please”.
Financial shenanigans started with Palmisano's predecessor, Lou Gerstner, the first outside IBM CEO.
Reading about IBM CEOs, before and after Gerstner, the CEO was an IBM-lifer who came up through sales/marketing. Though Gina Rometty started in tech-related area at IBM. The current CEO has the deepest tech background of any IBM CEO. The company has pivoted towards cloud, esp. hybrid cloud.
IBM has exited many hardware/software segments to concentrate on consulting and being the goto for outsourced IT departments since the dot-com crash.
They've tried goosing sales by touting AI a couple times before the current wave - Deep Blue and Watson, which didn't have much long term impact revenue-wise.
They've gone after the cloud, esp. hybrid cloud, with recent acquisitions, esp. RedHat.
Meh. After I finished my stint at Big Blue, they outsourced my entire midrange (UNIX) team which supported a large Australian bank to a foreign provider.
2 years later I had recruitment consultants calling me multiple times a week to get me to "come back" to IBM as the offshoring had been a disaster for the customer. And this was despite of me having a lifetime IBM ban for flipping off my manager's manager on the way out.
The reality was that I already knew from stories I'd heard that they were terrible with renewing contracts - they always waited until your contract had expired, and then would have an expectation that after a few weeks of unemployment you'd be desperate to re-sign and come back.
Knowing this I had another job already lined up ready to go as soon as my contract ended. If you treat staff like cattle, you reap what you sow.
Google’s deal with Apple is def problematic but apart from that I really don’t think it’s a monopoly.
Google leadership (according to public info) was in a panic about ChatGPT and rightly so. It was eerily similar to what Google once was at its inception: a no bs way to get better answers to your questions.
Luckily for Google, hallucination is a significant issue. Just “GPT it” is already in the modern vernacular. Google is in serious danger of becoming Facebook: only used by boomers (now millennials) while the new gen gets their adds on Insta, TikTok and could soon be served Llm generated product reviews and comparisons with link to buy from ChatGPT.
Obviously the question that really needs answered is “does Flutter have a future?”
Given Google is notorious for killing popular products, the fact they just fired a bunch of people dedicated to make this product work and the rather niche nature of Dart and Flutter… all signs point to it being becoming an open source project.
In my experience Google’s OSS projects have a high bar and have a less kafkaesque leadership than Google products. Now, one issue is that all tech that’s derivative of Google, ie Bazel, Go or k8s, tends to have “blind spots” where some parts are ignored because it’s not a need internally. The prime example would be Go’s utter garbage dependency management prior to go mod, which came very late. This wasn’t much of a priority for Google because they had their monorepo. (Nowadays it’s all dandy though). Conversely, what oss language writes sanitizers, race detectors, coverage checkers, migration tooling etc? Only the big guys do, and that can be quite nice for the rest of us.
Anyway, Flutter! Yes technically it’s an “open source project” but really it’s halfway to product/platform, no? That’s probably a bad sign (not Googles fault but run-of-the-mill oss maintainers don’t typically excel at product and design decision making). Dart? Also probably a bad sign for obvious reasons. And if Google abandons it, I imagine there’s a lot of infra (for cross platform testing etc) that goes away, and that’s assuming Google gives flutter away to the community instead of staffing it with a skeleton crew until it fizzles out. (Maybe I’m missing something in how it’s governed though, let me know)
Yeah, personally I don’t think flutter can survive without the Google breathing apparatus. But it’s not impossible. We really need and deserve something like flutter. But is there enough value over Tauri/Electron etc where people can reuse their frontend stack sanely? I think it depends on how well the competition catches up with mobile support, which is the current pain point.
Disclaimer: ex-google, somewhat recent contributor to (and user of) tauri.
Tauri has a big community. Flutter has a big community. Do you believe Tauri can survive without a direct corporate backing, while Flutter can't?
It's not a rhetoric question. I'm in need of a native application toolkit, and I gravitate towards Tauri for technical reasons. However, I'm not sure if the Tauri project has enough cash flow to sustain a durable alternative to Flutter, Qt, Avalonia, JavaFX, Compose Multiplatform, and likes.
JavaFX is a pretty dead project. Especially on mobile where it has zero users. It actually proves parents point, without Google flutter will be too big. Yes, there will be companies who will pick it up and compile it. That's hard, but doable. The problem is that there's a ton of moving parts. Testing alone is a huge task.
Some companies might pick it but then they would only test the use cases they need or a personal fork. It would also sink without the Google brand to back it.
Saw a tweet a few years back about how in China there was a lot of interest in cross-platform solutions. Both Alibaba and Tencent use Flutter in some capacity. It’s possible they might fork it and continue using it. Unfortunately, between that might being an internal-only project, and the seemingly siloed separation between Chinese development communities and the rest of the world, that might not help Flutter’s status, should Google end its patronage.
Yes, although that was quite recent, as Oracle was trying to breath new life into OpenFX, after it was taken outside of the JDK, keeping Swing the best option for those that don't want to deal with OpenFX distribution of native dependencies.
As far as I am aware, Project Mobile doesn't have much uptake, outside companies that are already working with Gluon.
Indeed, Johan Vos of Gluon is the leader of the Project Mobile.
Swing remains a decent GUI toolkit, but it still requires native dependencies for stuff like OS file dialogs and other platform APIs, audio/video codecs, hardware-accelerated graphics.
Swing ships with the JDK, so whatever native dependencies are required, application developers don't need to care about them, unless they are making use of jlink, and to this day many still prefer to push to some JRE being installed, than making use of jlink and jpackage.
Which is why alternative JDK distributions still offer JRE variants, while officially from Oracle's side one should either use plain JDK or jlink/jpackage.
There's Codename One, it's much better than anything available for Python etc. but since it's an independent OSS project from a small company it sadly never got the traction of flutter/react native.
> Do you believe Tauri can survive without a direct corporate backing, while Flutter can't?
Currently, I think tauri can survive yes. But I know much deeper the tauri community than flutter, where I’m just speculating as a bystander.
In fact, Tauri losing money would be much less bad than losing 1-3 of the core workhorses that are volunteers primarily afaik. This in fact is the biggest risk, imo. If any of them stop working it's gonna be really hard to recover, because they’re so autonomous and make sensible decisions.
But mostly flutter seems like a much more ambitious project, because they define UI and rely on Dart. Tauri and electron piggyback on browsers which imo is strategically and technically the only reasonable way to do it long term. They can almost exclusive focus on cross platform issues (which btw is an enormous undertaking on its own).
The current project manager of the flutter team has said that their developer headcount, roadmap, etc. hasn’t changed and only some devops positions have been relocated.
Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
I was helping an elderly relative who works as a translator and hasn’t touched a modern version of word in about 5 years.
They had a new computer and I got an ms office sub for them.
The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening. It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
For knowledge workers who live in these tools, the difference is stark. Even for companies who've standardized on Google Workspace or Apple iWork, advanced users will need Microsoft Office.
This is true. Among other things, I do a lot of label printing and the tools in MS Word are miles more mature. You get these same types of responses when people list off all the alternatives to Photoshop. Just not the same.
Yes, my pet peeve is printing as pdf. You can control line thickness, size, placement of row borders to pixel perfect in Excel & it will get printed to pdf or paper exactly as it is. But not from Google Sheets or Excel Web, even same excel sheel imported in these & then printed will have slight difference in what you see on screen and what gets printed. I understand its because of browsers limitations to place stuff on pixel scale.
Mostly because of network effects and wanting software that will be supported for another three decades potentially and can open my document long-term. Google cancels products all the time and has practically no vision.
I am exclusively Google office user, but... Out of the top of my head:
* Google docs are uglier than Microsoft word documents. This matters when I prepare an offer that I want to send to a client, and it should look good.
* Google slides are hideous, and the only reason I get away with using them is because programmers (including me) have no taste[1]
* Related to the looks, I sometimes buy paid document templates that I can use to format my offers. They often have an option to download a docx file, but it's complex through that you can't important it to Google docs without breaking it completely.
* Word/Libreoffice works offline (maybe docs with serviceworkers too? It never worked for me when I needed it).
* You can use word to generate documents using a template, don't think it's possible with Google docs
* Macros are not supported in Google docs
And I'm a complete noob when it comes to document editing software and actively avoid it. I can only imagine how much powerusers miss.
MS Word templates are one of the most awful things I've ever messed with. I had a fun time using them with pandoc to produce autogenerated word documents. ARGH! The nightmares!
We should just all get off our butts and learn LaTeX! Not that I have. ahhahahaha.
Is it just about the default font? Most office workers have 0 sense of aesthetics and sometimes official guidelines actively make things ugly (like forcing fonts like Times New Roman on everyone). Or the cutesy Calibri on official notices.
As a commercial lawyer, I often have to exchange drafts with another lawyer somewhere else. Almost everyone will accept Word, far fewer are happy with a Google doc. Obviously I can generate a Word document from Google, but that isn't quite the same.
A specific problem in this scenario is tracked changes. Google has a history/version control but it does not map particularly well onto Word's tracked changes, which the other party will understand and is likely to want to use. Passing things into and out of Google will often result in loss of useful information like that.
Personally: Word is the absolute best piece of software for dealing with numbered lists that is easily available. In many ways it is terrible of course, but it is less terrible than anything else. Getting numbering right is important.
Google has gotten better. It used to be very bad at larger and more complicated documents. But it still doesn't have all I need to write a really good contract (at least by my standards of "really good").
> What features in Office are essential for those users that you don't get from Google?
Backward compatibility with existing documents that are already in Word. Also, for those knowledge workers who aren’t in tech, the high likelihood that the recipient can open the document with correct formatting.
...since then they will send you back a scan of a printed-out copy of said PDF in which they scribbled their comments and modifications with pen and marker?
Oh boy. Outlook users are in for a surprise with "New Outlook" is forced on them in the near future. Microsoft has been pushing and warning about this change for some time ....
I use outlook for work mails and tried new outlook for a short while. It’s like an alpha version, it’s not even close to feature parity, a pure showcase for a new design. If it ever becomes the only version, I’m switching to thunderbird.
I used the default Mail Microsoft Store app for the past 2 years at work. The past 6 months, it's been telling me to move to Outlook desktop app. A couple weeks ago, it wouldn't allow me to use the Microsoft Store app anymore, so I installed the desktop version, tried to login, and got an error message that my account would only work on the webapp.
Set up Thunderbird on my work desktop that day, and haven't looked back. Wish I would have way sooner, to be honest.
Thanks, but I just switched back. Just far too bad performance (for my use case of ten-thousands of mails in subfolders), and as a bonus a spam filter that ignores actual spam, but marks real mails as spam consistently.
The interface is far nicer than outlook, but the performance is just too annoying for me.
Oh, very cool. Thanks for sharing -- glad to know I have this option if I want to go back. Now that I have Thunderbird set up, I'll probably never use the UWP Mail and Calendar app or this Wino Mail app.
If some kind soul wants to point to an email client that has a capability like Outlook rules I'm dying to know about it. I have a mate whose business is entirely based on a big set of Outlook rules to do processing and there doesn't seem to be any good alternative.
Outlook online doesn't seem to have any rule capability and can't talk to 3rd party email servers.
Google Docs can't automatically number headings, figures, and tables. It also can't automatically update cross-references ("see Figure 3 in Section 3.4").
Some colleagues have issues because it can't handle very large documents too (above a few hundred pages).
I think it's less about feature parity and more that the users have spent tens of thousands of hours in MS office and don't want to relearn all the shortcuts and menus and subtle behaviors -- muscle memory stuff.
All the plugins for excel, word and powerpoint integration. And we have to be able to send attachments with actual files, not links. Law firms and banks are pretty set in their ways here. It has to be office and windows.
Google sheets doesn’t remotely compare to excel for serious financial modeling.
I hate Microsoft products in general but Excel is just good. It is not one feature but the whole package as a system.
It is basically the opposite of most MS products. There is not one feature that stands out as to why I hate Word, it is the summation of all the little things I hate about it that is the issue.
In that case, they can use FreeOffice, whose office suite is indistinguishable from MS Office and works on Mac and Linux! (Granted, I say that as someone who very much does not live in those tools except as a rare hardship imposed by normies society.)
This. Believe me, Office and Office clones are very distinguishable. It's like saying a Macdonalds burger is indistinguishable from a Gordon Ramsey burger. They may both be food, but they are very much not the same thing.
There's a reason people use Office. Pretending that reason does not exist does not make the argument for switching better.
Imho it doesn’t come down to one or two killer features, it comes down to momentum.
Stuff like font rendering, grammar- and spellchecking, the exact set of Excel formulas, graphs, templates, and VB scripting matter. The office suite’s localization changes keyboard shortcuts, Excel formulae names, and swaps between decimal points and commas. It is absolutely horrendous, but people rely on it for their daily work.
In essence, if we accept that Excel is both an IDE and a dialect of a programming language, we can compare it to asking what makes C# in Visual Studio worse when people are used to Java in IntelliJ. The answer might be “nothing, but I’m used to my setup and it’s ridiculous that I’m even having this discussion about my main work tool” for programmers, Office users, and video editors alike.
Sort of unrelated, but, VB scripting not working on web versions felt to me like it really killed a giant moat of legacy code to draw from.
If you're forced to script in something else then why not just go to something else. Additionally, having tons of forms written by long gone employees just not port over is a tough sell at smaller offices.
You're happy with what you are using, so that's great, and I'm not knocking that.
But the difference is not 'killer features". The difference is in the million small details and polish. The integrations, formats, UI, workflow, things it just "gets right" that I don't even know its doing.
I try Libre Office every once in a while. But each time I try it just feels old and clunky. It's all in the tiny details that add up to the overall experience.
Clearly you're not missing anything since you're happy with what you have. But going from Office to LibreOffice is painful. Not bullet-wound painful, more like thousand-paper-cuts painful.
There are significant feature differences that enterprise users consider dealbreakers just between MS Office for Windows and MS Office for Mac, let alone Office clones.
So many microcosms with tech. I'm always reminded here on HN how terrible Office is and why we don't just use Google Docs. I hold this same opinion personally. However I go to other communities (I think the last one I remember was some startup subreddit) and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.
I assume it's just that we prefer the devil we know than the one we don't.
I don't think that the decision is being driven by bad company A v/s bad company B, and it's implicitly technical.
All of us here probably will know when to jump out of spreadsheets and have some knowledge on how to approach things then, so a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs is fine for us.
The problem outside, is that they are somewhat locked on the spreadsheet and have to stick with it, so more advanced features are welcome even though it comes with the price of the so called evil company according to the other group.
And is Office really better than Google's Spreadsheets? Idk, I don't care about small differences, but they surely annoy hardcore users, plus no one really got fired for buying IBM
Google is definitely the devil I know of those two, still I would not like it if one my main tools were provided by Google. Currently they seem to manage to both lack in innovation AND be unreliable.
I generally don't see people recommending teams, typically business users seem to prefer zoom while the ones who use teams are forced to because it's bundled with other Microsoft products.
Excel on the other hand is still miles better than Sheets for non-trivial use cases and I've seen business users revolt multiple times if you try to force them to use GSuite. To a lesser extent that's also true with Word and to an even lesser extent Outlook.
I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).
The interesting one is PowerPoint which I've noticed a lot of power users are migrating to Figma for. Also 10 years ago people would send nasty grams if they couldn't get Visio licenses but Lucidchart seems to have eaten that marketshare.
>I haven't yet seen someone threaten to quit if they don't get a Teams license (but I have seen that for Zoom).
Uhhh what? I suppose I am a novice video chat user who just uses it to talk to people and share a screen, but I am clearly missing some killer feature. From my perspective, all of the platforms suck for one reason or another. Bad CPU usage, latency, but hey, they have background swapping and fun emojis!
>and GSuite is being mocked and everyone is recommending Office and Teams as the obvious choice for starting your business.
These must be paid shills. While it's actually quite understandable why real people and businesses would want to use and recommend MS Office, no one in their right mind actually thinks Teams is the best video chat tool in the world. Any serious business uses Zoom, Slack, etc.
Not a paid shill, but Until recently Teams had capabilities Slack was laughingly behind :-/
Biggest one for me was that I could
A) start multiple chats with same audience and rename them - so I can have chat with thom dick and Harry on system architecture over a few days and separate conversation with them on performance testing issues. This is trivial in teams. I have to create awkward channels in slack to approximate the functionality.
B) seamlessly start a conversation with two people, then as you troubleshoot and expand, add more people, then jump in a call, then finish a call and keep chatting. Until recently slack would force you to start a new blank conversation when you added people - absolutely useless. Now they've hacked a solution that works up to arbitrary number of ten people and is so clearly a script in the background which still creates a new chat with added person but helpfully copies all conversation over. Then you need to add 11th person and too bad you've hit the magic number.
In operations setting and evolving incidents, teams was just better. And don't get me started on slack "huddles"!
My inlression has always been the opposite - startups used slack because it was cool. Serious businesses used teams because it worked and integrated well.
Now. I've realized lately that when people talk about slack vs teams, they're usually not actuslly talking about slack vs teams. They're actually talking about their companies security and usage policies, as incidentally instantiated through the collaboration tool of choice. I've become aware that my experience with teams is bit everybody's, due to various policies and limitations imposed, and similarly for slack.
But mostly... Not nearly as many people that disagree with average internet forum dweller are paid shills as may be believed :=)
Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack, including a files feature that supports editing MS Office documents in place, and integration with Outlook calendar and email and other Microsoft apps. I also think that Slack didn't have video conferencing until relatively recently?
As with the IBM model, I imagine it's simpler for companies to have a single source and a single support channel. It is possible to use Exchange sign on for non-MS systems and apps however.
> Teams, as much as I may dislike it, seems to have more built-in features than Slack
Isn't that the problem with Teams? Instead focusing on highly usable text chat, the focus is growing the pile of integrations with other mediocre Microsoft products.
(Not that Slack is great; it's been bloated and slow for a long time and has likely been on steep downward trajectory since the buyout by Salesforce.)
Unfortunately my "serious business" of $2B revenue dropped Zoom and Slack like a hot rock when they signed an enterprise Microsoft deal, because Teams is free, and usability, productivity and job satisfaction be damned, and your jobs are moving overseas anyway and nobody dares complain there.
Teams has network effect behind it. Because so many businesses already use Teams, in a B2B-setting you're almost expected to already have Teams as well.
I'm not an Excel jockey but friends who are testify to its power and flexibility.
I use Word a lot and the ease of use still beats gdoc's. For example, the macros and the "customize keyboard" options are great. cmd-l for "next edit," cmd-j for "accept and move on," cmd-; for "reject change." The speed is paramount.
Word and Excel, like Photoshop, are dominant because of their maturity as well as the muscle memory of their users.
People were pissed 18 years ago when the Office ribbon was implemented because it broke their workflow. MS might have gussied it up now, but they haven’t dared to reinvent it since.
Same here - there are 1000 options, across 15 tabs, and I have to look through all the icons and labels till I find the one, with active tab and even displayed options changing depending on content selection.... It's a constant battle if you don't spend hours a day in MS apps and develop muscle memory.
I do realize that there are probably no ideal UIs for accessing such a breadth of options, and it was a valid attempt, but not really successful, imo. With some adjustment and practice by users, I believe something like Alfred within the app, with smart search and suggestions, would be a quicker and more efficient approach for tool activation. Since there has to be also a good way to discover features without explicitly searching for them, maybe something like the Start menu is the right approach - quick search, but also categories and lists of tools.
The search bar is excellent and being keyboard driven fast too.
The ribbon is also entirely keyboard-drivable and fast that way. I’ve seen the data on why it was introduced; it was a scaling issue- the old toolbars simply could no longer fit all the functionality in apps like Excel, so they made them context-aware.
Importantly: The ribbon also makes the shortcut chords discoverable, so people can find shortcuts for the stuff they use often by themselves. It lets you get at tons of functions both as a first-timer discovering stuff visually, as well as a seasoned veteran with keyboard alone. There's some things they could polish a bit (colour pickers, mainly), but the system is overall really good.
To be fair, or maybe only in my opinion (but i had a teacher who agreed with me so :/), from at least 2008 until at least 2012 (So from when i discovered how nice it was until after i quit using word/openoffice entirely and only used Latex), OpenOffice/libreoffice templating features were more powerful than word's, although less intuitive.
Gdoc is shitty however and i don't see how/why i want to use it over any competitors. I think i prefer Nextcloud's editor, even without the privacy/data mining consideration, and i really think that could be improved.
Gdoc is better than Jira and Confluence editor though, and better than the standard redmine editor froma few years ago (the non-markdown one), so that's nice.
I can buy all of this. I've periodically played around with Libre Office on MacOS and usually found the text rendering leaves something to be desired. It's one of these things that I'm glad exists and yet don't really use.
edit: I just downloaded the latest version and the text rendering looks good! Now time to see how it handles dark mode (white or green text, black background).
A lot of productivity type people on Twitter are to some extent slaves to fashion, and in that world eg. Microsoft just doesn't exist. Cool people don't use it, so we end up in a comedy world where ostensible productivity experts gush over random startups' products while M365 is like six times the size of Google Workspace, which again dwarfs all the startups by itself. It gets really silly sometimes when they start gushing about like, a new way to make slide decks. Then you read some essay about all the ways GSlides is torture, and you start to understand.
First party of course. MS has gold plated support agreements especially for public sector customers, where you can get a real person on the phone, not at the mercy of some automated Google bullshit.
Is it expensive? Yes. But if you're running an entire city as opposed to a small dentist's office, it's likely worth the money.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
My mom had to buy a copy of MS Office. Her university provided free ms office online, but there were certain features missing from it she needed for her papers. I am remembering wrong, but it was annotations? Citations? I do not remember.
Libreoffice kinda could do it, but I could not find how online, while MS had it properly documented on their website and so many youtubers making videos on MS Office had it listed on their website.
Edit: also found out MS Office can screen record and record her webcam. Very useful for her giving a remote presentation during covid.
> But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?
OBS is very powerful, but the complexity of its UI can scare non-technical newbies away. MS Office gives you a lot less power, but is much more welcoming when you aren’t technical and this is the first time in your life you’ve ever done it
> But video recording and streaming? Why would anyone prefer to use MS Office for that when OBS exists?
OBS was a lot more complicated. Yes, professional streaming you should use it.
She was doing a ph.d in social sciences. She had little desire, or really need, to use it when MS Office did what she wanted out of the box. Screen recorded presentations with powerpoint.
> Is it as obnoxious as having to use Teams for chat?
They did not use teams for chat. They used gsuite for almost everything else.
> That's certainly a case of having a hammer and thinking all problems are nails xD
No, it really is not.
> Annotations, citations, bibliography management I can understand, even if I use LaTeX for that and consider it a far superior tool.
Really? My mother was struggling to remember how to use a Windows desktop. You really want to suggest learning latex when she had term papers to do for a $60k degree? The required document format was ms word.
There are a ton of very specific pieces of functionality that are built into Microsoft Word that caters to business edge cases. Features that have worked the same way and have not been touched for years for compatability reasons and are not duplicated in other software/services. Word is a bloated mess, but incredibly feature rich.
Office is Final Cut Pro. It is brimming with features and power.
But lots of people aren’t working at some corporate office. Mom and Pop can get far with the iMovie option like Google Sheets and Docs.
Actually now that I say that… what I want is a LibreOffice equivalent of Google Docs and Sheets and Presentations. Google is the only bad part of my Docs experience.
The popularity of all these paper emulators seems odd to me.
Like, how long after the advent of software will it take before our workflows find their authentic shape? Or was that shape really just a list of flat rectangles all along?
I love the question as I'm constantly faced with the absurdity of user-hostile software. It was supposed to be built to help humans. Instead it creates PTSD.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
Precisely because some of that "bloat" is useful for others. Off the top of my head, I really dislike that Google Docs doesn't support stuff like creating your own styles to apply in the document. My use case, for example, is having a style for inline code, with a monospaced font and a different colour, which I can do in Word creating a new style and applying it, but can't in GDocs.
> The poor person re-did about 4 hours of their work 3x because they couldn’t find the file MS Word had guaranteed them it had saved, so they had to start from scratch.
It should appear as a recent file once you open word, no matter if it was saved to OneDrive or locally. And it certainly isn't so hard to choose where to save it, if OneDrive, a SharePoint site or locally. At least nowadays.
Microsoft in a nutshell… I swear they offplanered their ux people to the moon where they couldn’t do anything. Or they have no ux people. Or their ux people have no effect.
They do, and right below the file names is its path. However, the elderly relative had never opened the file on the new computer/Office install, and likely never had any idea where they'd originally saved the file.
I'm not a psychologist, but I think it's the same reason I still can't get into IntelliJ.
Let me explain: I cut my teeth on Vim. I've been using Vim since I was 17 (I'm 33 now). Nearly everything I do for fun has been with Vim. Most of what I've done for work has also been with Vim (or NeoVim). I write documents in Vim with Pandoc. I compose emails in Vim (using Mutt). I use Vim whenever I do an interactive rebase in git. I do CAD Modeling with Vim using openSCAD. The keystrokes are just second nature to me, I think in Vim keystrokes now, for better or worse.
The IntelliJ Vim plugin is actually very good, but it's not quite perfect, there's subtle, intangible things that I have to adapt to, but are different enough to annoy me. For 99% of people, I think this is more than "good enough", and I still use it when I write Java, but I still am just unable to "like" it.
I don't use MS Office, but I suspect that if you've been using it for a long time, even tiny differences that you'd experience with Google Docs would become infuriating.
I think it's worth it, but just a warning, I'd be skeptical of the claims that some people make, where they act like "learning Vim made me 10x faster at coding!"
I do feel like Vim allows me to "translate my intent to the screen" really easily, and I avoid context switching as much, but I doubt it makes me appreciably faster at writing code. It's pretty rare that typing speed or "how fast I can edit" is the blocking factor for writing software.
> Very hard for me to understand why, in a world of Google docs, anyone would want to deal with the bloated mess that is ms office.
I see you have never opened a large spreadsheet in competing software or you wouldn't call MS Office bloated. Sheets and Calc are extremely slow, inefficient software. Excel alone, if you have a use for it, makes it well worth the price of admission. It simply has no competition and neither Google nor Libreoffice can serve as drop in replacements for that.
Most of the features in the Office suite get out of the way and are only there if you need it. It's no bloat to the people who need the features. Office is where Microsoft still shows love for desktop software and it shows, they open very quickly and feel responsive in a way most other software they produce don't (opening the widget board on Windows 11 is a more stuttery experience at times than opening something in Word or Excel)
> It did save it. In their fucking cloud and made it so opaque that the user couldn’t possibly understand wtf was happening
You can't save it in the cloud "by accident". When creating a new document and clicking to save you explicitly have to pick "onedrive" or "this computer" as locations.
> It took me, a tech professional a good 5 minutes to snap out of the dark pattern and realise what was going on.
It took you 5 minutes because you had no idea what the user did. It's not the fault of the software if the user clicked to save to onedrive.
You can also still create new blank documents directly in the explorer.exe (right click -> new -> word document) as you always could since Windows 95 in which case you would have set a local location for the document you're working on before writing the first line of text.
I also find it interesting you're suggesting Docs, a piece of software that is cloud driven only, as a replacement for Word because a user mistakenly "saved to the cloud"
And if giving people the option to save to onedrive is a "dark pattern" then what is a piece of software that can /only/ save to google drive, exactly?
Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions is the whole desktop suite + the online apps (which are pretty competitive with Docs if you need to access something on another computer in a pinch) + 1 terabytes of storage + up to 6 users (each with their own 1tb of storage) on the same subscription for 99 bucks a year. Google can't even begin to compete on that level of offering. Some of the apps have no real google alternatives either, OneNote is an incredible tool for personal organization of ideas and clipping online content you want to keep. It's also very snappy and responsive, again, the Office division really cares about quality of desktop software in a way that has become all too rare. The people working on Windows's desktop/UI elements would do all too well to take inspiration from them because 11 is a damn sham.
The pros you mention above are true for the desktop versions, but most definitely not the browser versions, in my experience. The browser versions feel squishy and feature incomplete and the interface is different enough to be annoying enough for me to avoid it like the donut with a hair on it.
Mine is a very Excel-centric view. I wouldn't miss anything else in the office suite.
I’m keen to understand what features you found lacking in the web version of Office. My initial impressions aligned with yours; however, upon recent usage, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by its extensive feature set. While advanced data extraction capabilities in Excel are notably absent, the web version otherwise provides a comprehensive array of functionalities.
Might depend on how recent. As a result of past annoyances I haven't revisited it in the last 12 months, except accidentally. The memory of the annoyance remains, whilst the specifics have been lost to time.
I'll give 'er another shot. I'm aware of my tendency to happily burn big tech for the slightest sleight.
Very hard for me to understand why as the owner of a computer you want to put precious data on someone else's computer. Especially someone that has no customer service, a history of killing products with no good options for their users and frequently breaking laws.
Office has become a bit of a UX mess in parts, due to the cloud and web integration, but the overall functionality and integrations are still unmatched. Many people also continue to prefer native applications.
Their offering strikes a decent balance between the two. The fact that it is a native application really helped me when I traveled internationally, where my connection was spotty at best. I had a minimal slow connection on my phone that I couldn’t tether, and otherwise, I had to offload periodically where Wi-Fi was available from my PC. In places where you can assume to have a strong, always-on connection, they don’t make much difference, but in situations where I can’t count on it, Microsoft’s structure, which can tolerate offline usage, is very useful.
I use MS Office and Softmaker Office, both native and with perpetual license. Works fine for me. Not sure why would I need online service that can cut me off at any point with no recourse
Honest question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I never used Outlook, and I use Thunderbird daily so I wonder what I miss [1]. It also picked up development a bit and got some nice improvements, maybe check it out of you didn't recently. But I'm really curious why is it bad.
[1] I'm pretty sure outlook users miss good GPG support, at least.
Supernova has fixed a number of the performance issues with large mailboxes, but that was fairly recent. People steeped in Windows still prefer the sleek/modern UI in Outlook over TB, in my experience, but the biggest benefit in Outlook is just the tight integration in MS/365 land.
Calendaring in TB always felt like a bit of an afterthought compared to email, and for personal use, that makes sense. For business, strong calendaring with meetings/shared calendars/availability and the tight link to meetings (Teams)is not done as well anywhere else.
Ironically, we used thunderbird at at old job, because it was easy to screenshot for QAs instructions on how to check both the HTML and Text versions of sent emails.
On macOS/iOS I like Apple's suite of apps (and its desktop-mobile integration), and arguably Google's advantage is that it's web-first so it works well on cheap ChromeBooks that you don't think twice about replacing when they are lost or broken.
outlook has a gazillion things that are far far more of a joke than those lacks in thunderbird, those are just things people accept because they cant change it, and impose a 1:1 feature/bug requirement on a new thing, or its "not ready"
Yeah, they got it so fucked up that the average user has no idea where their files are. It is absolutely unbelievable how user hostile it is. Typical software designed for the goals of the creator. The world of computing has truly descended into hell for the average non-technical person.
Try editing a 200 page document in Google Docs. Last time I tried I had to give up. I detest MS Office too, and Google Docs is perfectly fine for a whole lot of my use cases, but it's not a complete replacement, and that'll be a problem for a lot of places where some subset of users will need other applications anyway if you pick Google.
The "lost" MS Office doc is infuriating, though - have had to help my son with several different variants of that for school over the years, including the reverse, where it's insisted there is no document at the location in the cloud drive it is meant to be, but where it turned out this was because it hadn't been synced from the local drive...
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