Exactly. In the 50 years history of Microsoft, Office ( Year ) was perhaps the best they did.

Nadella might have fixed a few things, but Microsoft still have massive room for improvement in many areas.

Nadella has the golden ship taking on water right now. He has entirely botched AI top to bottom. He has screwed that up to such a degree that it would be difficult to overstate. If he doesn't correct these mistakes extremely soon, he'll unravel much of the progress he made for Microsoft and they'll miss this generation of advancement (which will be the end of their $3 trillion market cap - as the market has recently perked up to).

There is no tech giant that is more vulnerable than Microsoft is at this moment.

Most document originations will begin out of or adjacent to of LLM sessions in the near future, as everything will blur in terms of collaborating with AI agents. Microsoft has no footing (or worse, their position is terrible courtesy of copilot) and is vulnerable to death by inflection point. Windows 11 is garbage and Google + Linux may finally be coming for their desktop (no different than what AMD has managed in unwinding the former Intel monopoly in PCs).

Someone should be charging at them with a new take on Office, right now. This is where you slice them in half. Take down Office and take down Windows. They're so stupid at present that they've opened the gates to Office being destroyed, which has been their moat for 30 years.

I am no big fan of MS, and especially not a fan of W11, but you're operating under the false assumption that their users are still their most important customers.

MS's bottom line doesn't depend on how happy users are with W11, especially not power users like ourselves. W11 is just a means of selling subscriptions (office, ai, etc). The question isn't 'are users happy' it's 'will OEMs and business continue to push it?'. The answer to that is almost certainly yes. OEMs aren't going to be selling most pcs with ubuntu included any time soon. Businesses are not going to support libreoffice when MS office is the established standard.

Maybe apple could make inroads here, but they don't seem willing to give up their profit margins on overpriced hardware, and I don't think I've ever seen them release anything 'office' related that was anywhere near feature parity with MSO, and especially not cross platform.

If their whole business is based around being an established standard and making users happy is not a relevant goal, then why do anything at all? They already are an established standard, so why would they bother taking any further actions whatsoever, making any changes or rolling out any new products? Clearly they are trying to achieve something, right? So what is it?

It used to be empowering everyone to achieve more.

It is about making specific high value users happy. If the rest of us are unhappy - we don't matter. They know for most people ubuntu or whatever isn't a realistic option and so they can take whatever money they can get from those people. Sure a few people like me will run *BSD or linux, but we are a footnote not worth their time.

The only danger is every once in a while one of those little footnotes becomes large enough to be a problem and you lose the market of those who do matter as well. While there are many obvious examples of where that happened, there are also a lot of cases where it didn't.

Excel is the lynchpin. But you need to have a story for handling the other Office apps functionality. That's table stakes these days.

Did they put the Teams people in charge of AI?

Agree that someone should double down on competing with Office, but that alone won’t take them down. MS has spent decades listening to what SMB to large companies need, and has layers of absolute domination to bolster their lead. As an example, they have a stranglehold on catering to the Governance, Risk, and Compliance market. The most die-hard Linux folks I know turn to AD the minute they need to manage users and devices at scale. Need visibility into what is happening both remotely and locally, across your enterprise? MS has the typing and a smart sales deck that explains how you really just need another comparatively small investment to make your board sleep better at night. And that’s not even going into the license shenanigans they play to make Azure competitive against other clouds, for hosting MS-owned tools like Windows and SQL Server.

You mean Microsoft® Office™

My peak experience so far was trying to search if there was an extension of dotnet interactive for visual studio or only for visual studio code.

the interactive console is built into Visual Studio, no extension needed

I remember when everything was "Sign in with .NET Passport" as a yoot and just being like "what the hell are you talking about"

Cries in dapper dapr

I'm "I don't know what Xbox is" years old.

It's a music app. I thought that much was obvious.

Can I pair it with my Zune?

yes, directly through the Windows Phone using a Silverlight 1.0-enabled appliance

Seeing the name Silverlight in the wild did untold psychic damage. Excuse me while I crumble to dust.

I think it’s an Adobe Flex app now.

Pretty sure you can just ask Cortana to pair Xbox Music with your Zune.

Do you mean Xbox One? Or Xbox One X? Or Xbox Series X? Or maybe Xbox Series S?

Seriously, how?

About a year ago I had to buy a new Xbox. It took me time to figure out what model I had and what the new models are. It’s the least intuitive marketing on the market.

ROG Xbox Ally X.

But I actually had in mind the Windows app named "Xbox".

Don't forget Xbox 360, which precluded everything 365.

Well, it is a smaller number. I can't wait for the Xbox 370, just to one-up office.

I disagree. They need an Xbox 180... get it?

It's the successor to IXBox

I've heard the next version will be called "Visual Active NET Copilot".

"Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging" (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

That was deeply funny. I can almost smell the inside of CompUSA watching that.

I’d forgotten all about this gem. I think it was made by some Microsoft employees, too, which makes it even funnier to me.

Nineteen years ago. Nothing has changed.

Many will never know the joy of trying to search for it back in the days when punctuation was ignored (C# says hello too)

Related: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-servers-iden...

Try going on LinkedIn and searching for C# and .net jobs.

Completely impossible. The search is bad to begin with, but it explicitly ignores anything that isn't a-9.

Ha, I stand corrected. Maybe Microsoft could reach out to the owners of LinkedIn to convince them to improve it. Oh, wait...

>LinkedIn

You mean Microsoft Career Copilot 365?

No, I think that's Microsoft Viva Career.

Microsoft Active Career Copilot 365 ONE, thankyouverymuch.

Grow your .NET-work!

Shh, they'll hear you!

Somewhere and in some universe there was a Microsoft that did so, wreaking havoc across the multiverse.

Are we talking about .NET standard?

No, we're talking about copilot core, not copilot framework