Lol! Be like GitLab instead:
1 - Be the underdog with good reputation in a market completely monopolized;
2 - Have the incumbent self-destruct by vibecoding its product and pushing AI above every other feature to its customers;
3 - Loudly announce that you are leaving your past good behavior behind, and that you are betting everything on vibecoding and pushing AI to your customers!
The US Govt. as a customer, and the forges they operate / contract, being pushed to use AI is probably (unfortunately) a huge piece of this problem.
Yeah the push to use AI comes from above, and it’s not just in the US. Anyone who’s at the top levels of any company now can tell you that the party line is AI positivity and insistence that workers adopt it into their workflows, even if they themselves see little use for it or can find a way to incorporate it into their own workflows yet.
It is truly, deeply amazing how bad Microsoft is. Proton on Linux is FASTER than the actual directX it’s emulating is on windows. They got beat at their own instruction layer.
And they had Skype, which was practically a genericized trademark for “video call–” until first Apple’s FaceTime and then Zoom utterly took them apart.
And they had Office, which defined the product category so completely that it’s called “office software–” but then Google Docs took them apart on a molecular level.
Microsoft is the king of snatching defeat from the clutching jaws of victory.
but then Google Docs took them apart
Tapping the breaks on that one.
Google Docs is very lightweight, but it’s also very stripped down. Word remains the first choice in word processors for 90% of the market. It (and Excel) are a big reason offices haven’t seriously begun abandoning Microsoft.
Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.
I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.
I think we’ll eventually see folks migrate to Jupiter Notebook style data entry and management. But they’re relatively new and not well-integrated into modern workflows.
For the time being, people are brought into offices and trained on Excel, get comfortable with Excel, and continue to use Excel because that’s how they spend the bulk of their hours. You’ve got networking effect and priors cementing these apps as the go-to for an entire generation.
100%
Excel is the one actual critical application because it deals with data (and formulae), data which is only useful when you maintain its integrity (hopefully you’re not storing dates).
Word is just a shitty application for text. Needs that can usually be adequately addressed by a plain text file (or plain text email). It thinks it’s a desktop publishing application (goodbye MS Publisher). Any tool that can do rudimentary text processing will suffice for the vast majority of use cases. One might have footnotes and some meta data that might be important, other apps do that well. Even markdown can do that.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application. Any equivalent will suffice.
There’s quite a few other apps, I forget those.
Word is just a shitty application for text.
It’s fine. People love to shit on the app because Microsoft Bad. But it’s living at the rough midpoint of application quality, at least in it’s modern incarnation.
PowerPoint, likewise, is a shitty slide show application.
As a slideshow app, it’s another perfectly fine piece of software.
What’s disgusting about PowerPoint isn’t the app but the LinkedIn psychos who use it
I don’t think that’s the case, but I only have anecdotal evidence for that. I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference, and the last three I’ve worked at didn’t even offer it as a default. And I’m in my forties.
I haven’t ever worked at a company where Office was the preference,
I haven’t worked at an office where it wasn’t. And I’ve done years of consulting at Deloitte, so I’ve seen a few places.
Fair, which is why anecdote isn’t the singular of data I guess.
They also had Internet Explorer. When it was released it was actually good (compared to the competition). Internet Explorer was dominant, but then it turned into the punching bag of web browser memes.
Microsoft acquired Skype, did not create it. Then destryed it with its own hands.
It wasn’t that they destroyed it, it was more that they let it bit rot. Skype was honestly never a great user experience by today’s standards. The audio was bad, the connection was very unstable over mobile networks, and push notifications for calls was hit or miss. Microsoft acquired it, slapped a Microsoft login screen on it and then basically didn’t do anything to improve it. Meanwhile, Google created and killed seventy different video calling apps, which all worked better than Skype, and Apple stuck the landing with FaceTime.
They acquired practically everything they have. They haven’t created anything truly new since the mid-90s.
Very like Google, in that regard.
Google docs is far worse than office, in every way except for collaboration. It does not destroy them at all. LibreOffice is on par except for having no collaboration, but is not widely used so definitely haven’t destroyed them. Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon
Unfortunately for almost the entirety of the corporate world and govt bureaucracy.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
Is Google Docs as popular as Microsoft Office?
I work in finance/insurance and can’t see a way to move away for Excel (there’s still there spreadsheets with 10+ years still being used).
My wife’s company uses GDocs, but they’re do food research and barely uses those programs.
This is because Microsoft intentionally breaks excel and PP compatibility with Google docs in small but important ways. It’s the only thing keeping them afloat at this point. I have gotten into heated debates at work over this, because I prefer Google docs, but my boss will be like “we need to deliver this to customers who will open it in office and the formatting will break” and I’m like “that’s what a pdf is for.”
yup. anything you ship to anyone should be PDF regardless.
I would doubt it, it is nowhere near as good as office and google sheets specifically has much smaller worksheets than excel, with only 26 rows.
Do you mean… columns?
Could be. I mean the lettered ones, from A to Z.
Those are columns. Rows are numbered.
But Google Sheets isn’t limited to 26 rows, 26 columns, or 26 worksheets. Idk what GP was talking about. It’s certainly limited but not to that extent
Last I used it the rows/columns/whatever went from A to Z and no more
Proton (and Wine, what it’s based on) are not emulators. They are compatibility layers, it translates Windows system calls to native Linux system calls.
Or simply put: Wine Is Not an Emulator
WNE?
Ah, WINAE.
“Wine Is No Emulator” works ;)
Microsoft never fails to disappoint
Be Skype. You literally are the first one. You literally are the only one. Covid happens. Zoom pops up from nowhere and takes everyone. You die.
Still, still, I’m like, how???
Failing successfully tho.
Huh. I guess Microsoft and I have that in common.
🥁
You forgot the symbol crash at the end. How disappointing.
Typical!
invent copilotRebrand ChatGPT
Ftfy
Naah, the initial GitHub copilot was something else.
I was on the Github Copilot Technical Preview (invite in my mailbox says July 16th 2021) and it was GPT-3 (not to be confused with ChatGPT which was introduced with GPT-4)
ChatGPT was built on top of GPT-3.5 which was GPT3 with the new deep reinforcement learning to make it more “conversational”, launched 2022. GPT 4 launched in 2023 and before the official launch there was “I have been a good Bing. 😊” Which was… checks notes… microsoft messing something up again
Just like Skype getting lapped by Zoom during COVID
Have all the code in the world
Create LLM for software development
Try to advertise it
Oops, no budget
Get acquired by Microsoft
Enshittification ensues
Everyone else loots your code repos
Microsoft tries to put your coding tool in everything
Coding tool injected into Excel
Into Word
Into Teams Chat
Nobody knows what this is even supposed to do anymore
Copilot now synonymous with Clippy
Yeah, can’t even begin to imagine how this happened.
And the ONE useful feature (summarizing meeting transcripts) is behind a paywall corporate doesn’t want to touch.
“What do you mean this 4 hour meeting could be summed up in a single, 100 word paragraph without losing any important context or decision???” - higher ups seeing the summarized transcript, probably
That’s Microsoft. They got desktop PCs. They repeatedly failed to get mobile, they repeatedly failed to get portable, they never had embedded, they had fucking Skype at one point. They drink gold and piss nickel, Microsoft.
Don’t forget Vine was basically tiktok and they just binned it for no reason.
Well, I think Vine was too early. The videos were too short, could you imagine trying to put ads or sponsors in 6 second videos? So how do you monetize it?
The fact that it can’t even get PowerShell right when it should be intimately familiar with PowerShell commands and scripts is absolutely asinine.
If agentic LLMs are the prize, I’d be fine with losing.
They had Skype! It was the verb for video calling for god’s sake! How do you LOSE so BADLY so CONSISTENTLY and STILL have investors.
Sometimes I miss Microsoft Lync, but not often.
I made this comment as a joke but I actually do miss that chats could be in separate windows. s far as I know most major corporate (and non corporate, looking at you Discord) chat platforms don’t let you pop out windows.Edit: Okay, it’s just Discord that’s the problem then. It sort of supports it in that it will open the chat in your web browser, but then it does weird things like play the notification sound twice.
Microsoft could have been king with with chatgpt for personal superapp, github copilot for developers and something like sharepoint/power vibe widgets. But nooo, they make windows recall when ai models can’t run locally
if they had made a unified copilot agent they would have won. Think open claw with the power of NPUs for small tasks and cloud for big queries dedicated APIs for interacting with all the microsoft products special tailored version for developers. More focus on retrieving information and doing small tasks for the user than generating slop.
The first versions they released were so fucking bad and every app had basically just a chatbot with zero functionality. It ruined the product for when it could actually do tasks.
“if they’re gonna steal, they should at least do it right” I mean, I can see how someone would want to think that, but I’m fine with them failing to steal.
I don’t know the original author’s opinions on AI, but I think it’s still fair to say that it was clearly Copilot’s goal to steal all the code and be good, and they had all the code, and so ethics aside one would expect them to have succeeded with flying colour at whatever their goals were, even if those were bad goals.
But they failed instead, which is impressive.
What about Cleverbot? Or Tay?
It is impressive how much better claude is than copilot specifically for coding.
Like… how much bullshit is in Windows to learn off of, let alone github.
It’s weird because copilot in office tries to push agents on you as if it were a Jehovah’s witness.
So GitHub copilot doesn’t have them? I don’t really use that.
It’s saying Copilot was the first on the scene and had access to literally all of the training data anyone could possibly want, and is still being shown up by most other AI models. Their failure to capture the vibe coding space is a legendary fumble. At least that was my read.
Eh wait. Copilot (any of the about 30 products with copilot in the name) is not a model. Microsoft makes a few models like phi but they’re underwhelming. All of copilot runs on models from external parties like openai and anthropic. So basically Microsoft is at the mercy of their own competitors. They’re in the awkward position that providing training data to their model providers not only improves their own product but their competitors’ as well.
Additionally, Microsoft’s most profitable market is enterprise and they would absolutely shiver at their data being used for training and would abandon the service in droves.
Despite being “all in on AI” Microsoft is in a really vulnerable position. Their added value is their integration with their other services (and data therein through RAG).
