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 initiativ…
It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.
Hopefully SKG can serve as a precedent to help consumer rights expand.
> I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers. That has nothing to do with Stop Killing Games.
At least the servers bit seems very related no? I’d love to know more though.
The movement explicitly DOESNT want to force companies to keep their servers running. It is singularily concerned with keeping games playable in some form after shutdown. Be it via patching out the requirement on a server, providing a way to host it yourself or any other option, really.
Libre Office is fine standalone but as soon as you have to exchange files with other businesses you are often pretty much forced to use MS Office. Sad but true.
Just because they don't know how to use a computer well, doesn't mean you can't teach them.
Which is fine, if and only if that's your actual business
Other options include Calligra (especially on KDE) https://calligra.org And Macs are bundled with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, all of which are excellent.
Numbers is not excellent. It’s stubborn and unhelpful.
Apple should make their finance department use Numbers, it would be fixed in no time. I swear nobody at that company has ever opened Numbers, I don't understand how it can be so broken for so long.
Right, but if you bought office 2000 it was established that you would get to keep using office 2000 for as long as you wanted
There are probably still a minority using Office 2000 out there, because it still does everything they need.
Office 97 not only has everything most people need (wordpad has all features most people need; most users have no need for Excel or other office tools) it also starts up faster and uses less resources. The only question is do you actually need any of the massive quantity of features in modern office, or is word processing today still fairly simple for you. And maybe if you don't like MDI and want your multiple windows instead (the thing I miss most about old office is having 15 documents open in a single window when writing essays in school, without cluttering up alt-tab or the taskbar. That and the toolbar button that initiates the active screensaver). If you want to use your cloud storage (you really don't need it most likely) you'll have to use a sync tool instead of having it directly.
Turn off macros for security and make sure it can actually run (no idea when office stopped using 16 bit components), and I recommend firewalling it as well, but office doesn't really need to be up to date.
Why are we acting like VS Code is nothing but a way to stop independent developers from selling their tools? Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades. MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That would kneecap the company and destroy its parasitic blight on our industry for sev…
> Things like VS Code literally destroy the cottage industry and likely has held back our industry by several decades. VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades. > MSFT needs to be at least six separate companies: Windows, Office, GitHub, Visual Studio, Xbox, and Azure. That wo…
> VS Code was released in 2015, so even if its initial release somehow completely stopped the entire software industry, it would still not have held the industry back by several decades.
Why not? That’s 11 years, times (say) 5 potential independent editors or IDE that didn’t exist because of VSCode in that time is over 50 years worth of software innovation.
Did Apple pay them to drop support to boost their revamped Numbers/Pages/Keynote suite (ClarisWorks Infitniy.0). Obviously this is a joke, though there was a period when Microsoft invested in Apple to serve as a stand-in foil for the anti-trust lawsuit. So tactical investing for something other than monetary ROI has precedent …
In a way it's not a joke. I was just considering that myself. I pay for a M365 family license, but when I think about it, I could do everything I actually use it for in Numbers and Pages. The only thing is file format compatibility, it is useful to be able to open word documents and be sure the formatting is correct, but even that is less important than it used to be. I used to make use of Office to edit work documen…
The only reason I pay for M365 family is for the 1 TB per member storage. Excel is a bonus, and Word and Powerpoint are basically not needed any more.
If a better storage deal comes along, I'll happily cancel.
Companies might need Microsoft, but why are people panicking who could replace ms office with other office suites? Why aren’t they abandoning Microsoft products? From office suites to windows?
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-…
> 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…
> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL
I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".