zlacker

>>fortra+(OP)
> push by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform Microsoft into an AI-first company

Why can't we have a 'user-first' company. Maybe think about the user of your products a wee tiny bit. But no, it is not to be.

>>Eddy_V+S6
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.

>>Ethery+wf
Yeah and even the engineers and architects have no influence on the purchase decision. If you ask us we wouldn't buy Microsoft.

But they're really good at rubbing shoulders with the CIOs and convincing them their stuff isn't the mediocre trash it really is.

>>wolvol+ch
It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.

>>PaulHo+xh
Which one did they switch to?

>>jetbal+Uj
Here's a case of a recent one which is early in the cycle

https://www.pcmag.com/news/german-province-ditches-microsoft...

>>PaulHo+Uk
LibreOffice isn't bad at all.

>>wolvol+ko
LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.

It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.

>>simona+Yr1
I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.

I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.

In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.

I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.

Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.

What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.

But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.

So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.