My, memories are short. In 2008 Microsoft "Play for Sure" became play no more. Exactly the same stunt, 11 years before you bought that perpetual licence. Why anybody trusted the company after Play For Sure was a mystery to me.

And that was just the beginning. Then came Sony being ripped a new one, Azure being taken down by expired certs - twice in 6 months, critical certs signed with MD5 until it's so weak they were exploited, more recently China running rampant in hosted exchange scraping state secrets, GitHub with record down time, and Windows has become a dog slow ad platform. And yet today Microsoft makes the most revenue than any other software firm.

I dunno how they do it. After decades of treating their customers like shit, business has never been so good. They must have one mother of a sales team.

One application of AI I have found useful is in the quick composition of graphs via text-based graph description languages: graphviz (the great granddaddy), mermaid.js, plantuml, and of course derivatives like WireViz and CircuiTikZ.

A typical ask would be something like "generate a mermaid network diagram showing the relationships of all markup languages". It's surprisingly good.

A neat trick you can do if writing in Asciidoc: conditional directives are pre-processor directives, which means they're interpreted before the graphing engine goes to work. So you can make art that has sections which can toggle on and off based on document variables (the Asciidoc lingo for these is "attributes" but using that word can be confusing for old XML hands). Very neat when you have a block diagram you want to reuse for lots of different configurations.

[1] Unless I need 3d, in which case I'm afraid I like Blender a lot. Even more than Asciidoc.

Microsoft are price gouging. Shortly after Microsoft ended the 10x Free Business Premium for Not For Profit/Charities, I went to a convention and Microsoft had a talk about how to maximise profits from NFP/Charities;

"NFP doesn't mean no money" "Microsoft are doing more for charities and NFP to help build blah blah"

VERY rich after literally dropping these licenses which most small NFPs would run off exclusively for office staff.

Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.

I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.

But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.

Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.

However, I do think that the information itself (videos, documents) should be in open formats with open specifications, that allow new / other programs to open them.

I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.

I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.

People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history.

Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore.

Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401

Note that I did not say create a presentation. I said open a presentation.

The document in particular has a load of animations, videos, and "rich" powerpoint resources that have been carefully and purposefully designed to be difficult to interop with other software.

Remember?

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company."

https://web.archive.org/web/20110930232927/http://antitrust....

I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.

And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.

Apple gives you neither choice or value, but everything just "work$". People come to me saying I used windows and it sucked, and that's because they are comparing a 500 dollar Acer laptop with a 1500 Macbook Air with no knowlge on how to properly use Windows.

Both have their market place, unfortunately the users with the least knowledge are the ones always complaining about Windows. And, let me tell you, when something is broken with their Mac, they also don't know what to do. See OP's post as a perfect example. They blame MS not their IT admin.

It's the reason Apple calls their support Genius bar. They are trying to message out "Hey, you really are smart, we are just geniuses". Well, you're not.