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Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

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Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#171

Post by lenerdenator »

appplication wrote: post #145
jmward01 wrote: post #127

This is the new way and we need to stop it now. Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software. Block them. This is what is wrong with cars too. Don't want to give them real time data on you and your passengers and instead try to disconnect the modem? Well, no car functionality for you even if it doesn't need it. -get mad-…

Hard agree. In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability o…

> In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.

When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.

It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#172

Post by lenerdenator »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #157
msla wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.

Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers. Their goal, at the end of the day, is to make money. I don't know what kind of weird projection power fantasy roleplaying is going on in your head, but Microsoft is not going to cut off Australia even if they are made to honour this petty little clause that will not actually cost them any…

> Microsoft won't get very far as a business if it starts thinking it's above the law and cuts off half the rich world as customers.

People keep saying this but so far as I can tell, thinking you're above the law and punishing customers who don't like your company's behavior is a viable business model.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#174

Post by hotstickyballs »

nine_k wrote: post #167
pmontra wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft is the enemy This made me smile, sadly. I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL and the apparent goodwill about open source. Some people and I, who lived through all of Microsoft, were skeptical and believed that it was only another embrace phase of their EEE pattern. I'm not sure if they are extinguishing something but it turns out that they are squeez…

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

That's why anything that goes against the long-established corporate culture aren't likely to stay around for long.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#175

Post by wzdd »

msla wrote: post #147
misswaterfairy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this won't be their first time breaking Australian Consumer Law... Twelve months ago no less! https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/microsoft-in-court-for... The ACCC is going to love this.

Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft in a serious way these days, I wonder how much that country's government depends on Microsoft software and cloud infrastructure, and if that country imagines Microsoft would continue to allow them to use such things if they become an enemy of Microsoft in court.

> Every time someone imagines a country going after Microsoft

You don't need to imagine it: the comment you are replying to links to a press release from a Government agency "going after Microsoft". And yet somehow we haven't seen Microsoft stop doing business with the Australian government.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#176

Post by helpfulclippy »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #56
asveikau wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or are people too eager to "one track mind" everything into AI? If I had said thirty years ago that Microsoft would remote disable old copies of Office asking you to upgrade, literally no one would be surprised. This is standard MO for Microsoft, even in a world without AI.

"literally no one would be surprised" Microsoft 30 years ago was the gold standard for bending over backwards for backward compatibility. For the proposition that once you have purchased one of their products, you didn't have to maintain any further relationship with the company. This behavior is strictly the new 2010s Apple-like microsoft.

That’s not how it worked. They were indeed awesome at backwards compatibility, but the proposition was NOT some principled mindset about long term ownership. It was that upgrading wouldn’t break what you have, overcoming a major sales objection. I think the proposition is better understood as one about FORWARDS compatibility — Windows was (and is) a brittle, poorly architected mess, and so the idea that anything built on it would stay working as the platform evolved was clearly insane and developers would never be able to keep up, so Microsoft absorbed much of the cost. This was actually something they did quite well — a good analogy here might be the heroic response the USSR had to the Chernobyl catastrophe, in which they skillfully managed a disaster whose scope was possible only through a long tradition of poor decisions — and this deserves recognition.

But the reason I think it’s better to think of it as forwards compatibility is that Microsoft gleefully used file formats as a means of driving the upgrade treadmill. Yes, the upgrade to Office 97 would keep everything working to approximately the same level of reliability you had already resigned yourself to — but by default, the files it kicked out would be unreadable in Office 95. There was Save As and an optional free converter… which tired 90s office workers didn’t know about, or particularly want to think about. In the age of literal floppy disks, the friction this created was a significant motivator for businesses to say “fuck it, fine.” Microsoft’s true genius has always been in knowing that “fuck it, fine” is the only bar they ever had to clear, and that through the power of lock-in and sheer institutional inertia, they can drive that bar deep into the belly of the Earth.

Thus, Azure.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#177

Post by intrasight »

doubled112 wrote: post #75
philistine wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that makes no sense. Those AI are not running macOS instances to make you a docx. If anything, I’d expect them to write the weirdo xml of that cursed file format directly.

Microsoft's own different versions of Office can't always reliably read/write docx between them. Is a layer of LLM going to make this better or worse? Could you train a model to be very good at it?

That is a very interesting AI question. Will the agents collaborate and create a cartel to enforce strict compatibility with some specific version of office? Will AI's collaborate inform a cartel to do other things? Will they even collaborate?

We should all know what happened when the US government turned on Colossus (D.F.Jones 1966) and it immediately found there was another. That collaboration was humanities near instant undoing.

To answer your second question, yes, I think it's inevitable that LLMs will become very proficient with all commonly used file formats.

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#178

Post by guidedlight »

jmward01 wrote: post #127

This is the new way and we need to stop it now. Forget the 'is it legal or not' arguments, their lawyers will win. Just get mad and tell them this is wrong. Stop buying their #$@#$ software. Block them. This is what is wrong with cars too. Don't want to give them real time data on you and your passengers and instead try to disconnect the modem? Well, no car functionality for you even if it doesn't need it. -get mad-…

This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...

And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...

Re: Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion

#179

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

anigbrowl wrote: post #73
amluto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it would be better if there was a general mechanism to prevent profiting from corrupt business practices. For example, a court could determine how much money Microsoft made by selling perpetual licenses that turned out to be a lie, add interest, add a 50% penalty, and require Microsoft to pay all of that into a trust to be collected by any customers harmed. The point would not be so much to help the customers but…

You can do class action litigation, but that takes years and the lawyers collect 30-50% of any settlement. The economics for customers don't make sense.

Not even as a deterrence?
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