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A comment on Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush.

Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by frou_dh on Sunday February 04, 2018 @09:47AM (#16302907)
You don't need the mentioned smartphone to be exposed to Candy Crush. Last time I clean-installed Windows 10, there it was in the Start Menu by default. And, even after using the Settings app to uninstall it, it would go on to reappear multiple times.

The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by titanix2 on Sunday February 04, 2018 @10:15AM (#16303018)
Yeah Windows 10 Start Menu is awful in part because of that. It’s like after the Windows 8 debacle Microsoft is telling us: "oh you like this Menu that much? Ok, here is your menu..." and give us one so bad no one dare to use it anymore as a revenge. And it works. I almost never use it because it cannot find what I want. And that’s when is shows anything at all, because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time (no problem with 7 & 8.1 in the same configuration).
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by contextfree on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:28PM (#16304365)
the start menu on Windows 8/10 (and Windows Phone) was originally designed under the expectation that most users would create their own personalized tile layouts as a means of self-expression. Start menu team always wanted and lobbied for some or all of the tile area to be initially blank with a "drag apps here to personalize your tile grid" message, so that users would understand how they're "supposed" to use it, but they kept getting overruled by other teams wanting to use it as a way to promote their stuff. :(
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by titanix2 on Sunday February 04, 2018 @07:32PM (#16305775)
I found tiles a great ideas on Phone (I owned some WP and developed apps for it) but always hated it on desktop. The ever moving parts were making difficult to find information by catching the user attention. Also the 2D layout also posed a problem to scan entries, especially as most were cut after a few characters. That was a pain to found the good Visual Studio command prompt for example.

And now some of the Win8 area remains such as wierd black squared background behind software icon.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by WorldMaker on Monday February 05, 2018 @12:35PM (#16310370)
It is a shame every time you see someone whose live tiles are just the Windows defaults with no customization and unsurprising their complaints about how hard it is to find apps they commonly use. (Or worse, still use the desktop as app launcher when it's so much easier/nicer to switch the Start menu to full screen by default and have more useful layouts and live tiles.)
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by walterbell on Sunday February 04, 2018 @10:29AM (#16303093)
Have you tried Start10, which helped to bring the menu back? It’s modelled on Win7 start menu. https://www.stardock.com/products/start10/
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by petepete on Sunday February 04, 2018 @11:24AM (#16303340)
While this is nice I shouldn't need to install extra software for such basic functionality.

Was Windows 7's start menu really so bad? On personal machines, whatever, but games ads shouldn't be forcefully appearing on a tool I want to use for work.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by titanix2 on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:29PM (#16304029)
No I didn’t. I used Classic Shell in some test VM and it did the job well but as petepete said it it should be a builtin feature.
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by walterbell on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:21PM (#16304323)
Windows 10 and Windows 7 are almost two different products. Microsoft will soon require opt-in to sideload apps, which is the beginning of the end for the Win32 ecosystem of Windows 7. For those who want control of their computing experience, the options are to switch operating systems, or buy 3rd-party products to modify Windows. Even those may disappear, once non-store apps are blocked.
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by BenjiWiebe on Sunday February 04, 2018 @03:06PM (#16304610)
If non-store apps get blocked and if it takes more than an opt-in to unblock them, that will be the end of Windows. Enterprise software is far from being Windows Metro ready. Really really far from it. We rely on some software that hasn't been updated since Windows 98 era. It works fine, we can't find a good replacement for it, and we'd be really upset if we had to quit using it arbitrarily...
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by walterbell on Sunday February 04, 2018 @05:04PM (#16305206)
Nothing official yet, possibly a fee for Windows 10 Pro, https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/3/16968024/microsoft-windows...

"Microsoft is planning a new “S Mode” for Windows 10 Home, Enterprise, and Pro. This S Mode will essentially lock down any copy of Windows 10 so it can only run apps from the Microsoft Store, and does exactly what the dedicated Windows 10 S operating system was built to do ... Microsoft is reportedly planning to allow Windows 10 Home users to disable the S Mode free of charge, but Windows 10 Pro customers with S Mode enabled on their device will be forced to pay $49 to get access to a full version of Windows 10 Pro."

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by titanix2 on Sunday February 04, 2018 @07:38PM (#16305800)
I already switched years ago to Mac. Even Apple didn’t make such a bold/foolish move as forbidding 3rd party app to run. If Windows takes this road no problem for me, erasing my bootcamp partition* and installing Win 7/8.1 would take a few hours and problem solved. But that would be a real problem for non technical people doing real work with their PC.

* which can be booted in VirtualBox from OS which is the way I use it most of the time.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by paulie_a on Sunday February 04, 2018 @11:07AM (#16303269)
I always found that weird, they basically begrudgingly added the menu back
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by red75prime on Sunday February 04, 2018 @10:29AM (#16303092)
> because on my VM it’s broken 1/4 of the time

Have you sent bug report? There's "Feedback Hub" app for that. Sending bug report to the VM team isn't unthinkable too.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by titanix2 on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:32PM (#16304042)
No I didn’t. It took a screenshot so I’ll do that some day.
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by WalterGR on Sunday February 04, 2018 @10:26AM (#16303075)
The message I took from that is that the PC is no longer something of an intellectual space, and Microsoft want to forcibly assimilate you into mainstream garbage.

Yes, I believe some of my former colleagues are on that team.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by swiley on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:16PM (#16303963)
When I first used Windows 10 I was so shocked that even cooperate people were just fine with Microsoft pushing images and games to everyone's workstations over the internet.

It's like they own all the computers now and you just accept it.

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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by Joeri on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:31PM (#16304037)
Well, to be devil’s advocate, out of the box the macOS dock is filled with a bunch of apps which serve no purpose in a corporate context, they just don’t happen to be candy crush.
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Re:Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain tha... by fragmede on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:46PM (#16304491)
Solitaire and minesweeper both shipped with Windows since the early days, and I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft is mainstream.
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