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The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

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Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#61
post #34

A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.

>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives.

This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation.

I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I had to write a tech report to submit to our funding agency, using a Word template they require. It looked great on my computer. But when my advisor reviewed my document on his MS Office installation, the formatting was all wrong and unusable. Ditto for spreadsheets and slide decks (I can't count the number of times Google Slides mangled my PPTX formatting after I accidentally opened the file in the browser and it auto-saved). That's the reality of doing non-trivial work with external stakeholders if you're not using MS Office.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#63

Hate that if you use Word for Mac, you now have Copilot next to your cursor with no way of turning it off. I just want to use Word. I like its print layout features better than Pages. I don't want to switch. Just let me write and leave me alone. Now they're jamming AI down my throat without any opt-out mechanism.

> Just let me write

TextEdit all the way.

I used to edit a market-leading print magazine with TextEdit. I don’t need layout features, the designers do that in InDesign. I don’t need a grammar checker or AI because I can write.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#64
post #6

My problem with this isn't the price increase. It's the blurring of what used to be a clearly understandable suite of products (e.g. Office) and services (e.g. OneDrive) into a soup of weird AI and cloud stuff that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot). My mental model of what I'm actually purchasing is broken in this new paradigm.

Clearly understandable? Every time someone tells me on Teams about "the file they shared last week", I struggle to find out if I need to go to Onedrive, SharePoint, the Teams channel "files", the Teams channel "documents", etc. It's the most confusing piece of software I'm forced to use...

This reminds me of a very old e-mail from bill gates to his direct reports about the poor usability of windows (xp?)

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#66
post #34

A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. I have helped alot of people try LibreOffice, which offers everything they need from their office suit. Most people also like that LibreOffice looks like what Word and Excel looked like before Microsoft changed up the menu system.

>A lot of people use Microsofts products out of old habit and because they are simply not aware of any alternatives. This is an incomplete take. People use MS Office because everyone else uses it. In practice, that means if you try an alternative, then there's no assurance that your documents will render or function the same way on an MS Office installation. I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student. I…

> I tried going all LibreOffice when I was a grad student.

How long ago was this?

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I don't think it is weird. This button really has nothing to do with the product and it's use case as far as I can see.

That is what GP is pointing out as far as I can see.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“it’s weird that you would pick that to get upset about” feels like the kind of spineless jab that I hear a lot from people with a certain political slant, which is fucking annoying because I have the same political slant, and you just make people dislike us with terrible takes like this.

Having checkboxes for fully cosmetic nothings while simultaneously releasing features that cannot be disabled feels strange given they are clearly able to put the required effort in for a hollow, mealy mouthed, capitalistic pandering effort.

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