• kbal@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    They’re directly lobbying the government on a massive scale. They’re looking for every opportunity to force their software on people buying any computer, like they always have. They’re looking for every technical trick to screw the competition, and to extract more from their customers. Where it’s possible (i.e. not LibreOffice) they’re buying up any company that does threaten to successfully compete with them. They bought half the video game industry for example. They’re buying their way into all the schools so kids grow up knowing nothing but the Microsoft life.

    I mean what else would they do? It’s Microsoft.

    • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Excel is a wonderful piece of technology, the full capacity of which I don’t even come close to fully utilizing. I can appreciate that as a piece of art, but I can also get everything I need done in libreoffice calc and then I don’t have to support and rely on microsoft.

      • lobut@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        I’ve worked at some banks quite a few years ago and Excel was basically a cheap application space for them. The cells were inputs/outputs, they used VBA, and COM+ which talked to SQL to perform calculations and all that. It was really weird but every iteration that they wrote to replace Excel (they needed to because of banking auditing regulations) had failed simply due to the features they would get from it. It was wild to see at the time.

      • u/CaperGrrl79@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        Or OnlyOffice, but there are problematic elements. Then again, what doesn’t have that these days?

    • RoquetteQueen@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Chromebooks are taking over Windows PCs in public schools these days. I was only taught how to use Windows PCs when I was a kid in school, though. 90s/00s.

        • BigJohnnyHines@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          Arguably worse. Google does all kinds of sneaky things. Kids end up learning software without file management skills (like at all). This makes it very difficult to leave their apps and if they do it’ll be to to 365, maybe iCloud, not libreoffice.