I never had a particular love of Microsoft at any point in my life but at least they had a diverse portfolio of various products from software to services to hardware of all sorts.
Now they have abandoned most of that (and continuing to abandon more with each month) as they pivot to being one of many AI-focused grift companies. They now sell bullshit, lies, fraud, and scams as their primary products.
Incredible transition into a poisoned, bloated, festering asswipe of a company that isn’t worth a moment of anyone’s time or respect.
since they like rebranding so much, they should just generate new name every day
In a post on the Microsoft 365 Admin portal (I am glad it’s not renamed yet), the company notes that “Microsoft 365 Roadmap is becoming the AI at Work Roadmap,” as it “centralizes AI-powered innovation tracking without changing access or workflows.”
They didn’t rename a product. They renamed a roadmap to make it more general. That’s not that bad; certainly nothing worth doomposting about.
I really think we are watching Microsoft commit suicide in slow motion. It will take years but after a record number of bad decisions it will deflate into a tiny piece of crap another company purchases for cheap just for access to the brand name.
I wish you are right, but they are really big in the cloud sector. Azure brings them billions.
I doubt it. IBM is still around.
Is AI making decisions? It seems like it.
Anyone remember “Microsoft Works”?
(It didn’t)
I always use this as an example when I need to explain what oxymoron means.
I remember Microsoft Bob.
Yeah it wasn’t completely terrible, just less capable and less compatible than actual MS Office.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook
Of those four, only Outlook really could have used some changes. The other three were perfected 20 years ago. And how do you improve perfection? You can only make it worse.
Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all “email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)” apps are pretty bad. You’d think someone would have implemented something better by now.
Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn’t need to be any better.
Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as “styles”. You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.
Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.
Fine - Word can retain a “compatible layout” mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let’s push things forward.
My wife moved from WordPerfect (pre-Corel) years ago to Word strictly because all her clients were using Word and she got tired of converting things to work on their machine, especially when printing it out. Not because it was a better choice. This is Microsoft’s only power, dominating the market. Brilliant business strategy, I’ll give them that. Why they don’t use it to be better at the same time baffles me.
What is the point of writing better software when the entire ecosystem is built around Microsoft? Though certainly Zoom ate Skype’s lunch, and Slack is better than Teams… but maybe e-mail is too core a functionality, and, let’s face it, there’s old guys at the top that will fire their entire IT department before they get rid of their precious outlook. All my PST files for the last 20 years are on there! I have 200 inboxes and 400 rules!
Interesting thoughts on Word. I just know for what most people use it for–documents–it’s perfectly fine. It drives me up the wall that people pay for 365 subscriptions just so they can do that.
I really don’t want an AI ‘summarizing’ and changing the meaning of the emails that come in like an automated game of telephone.
Hell, in the majority of cases the summary is longer than the email.
AI is great at giving the appearance of work being done, but it sucks if accuracy matters.
I think you meant to say microslop, microsoft is long dead
Still haven’t figured out what to do with Copilot pro we have at work.
I’m sure this new name will make it useful now.
