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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

#311
post #9

Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.

The death of the high school essay will be when people realize best learning is done on the job and we get rid of highschools altogether.

We had child labor and it was horrible, if you only learn to work, and only learn through work then it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation by others. And an employer is highly motivated by capital to exploit you as much as possible.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well LibreOffice has at its core the ability to deliver me a text editor that starts in 25 seconds versus the 5 of Pages. I’ll stick to the one that saves me time every time I open it.

Really? It starts in 1 second for me. Must be a Mac thing. I thought they were supposed to be fast?

Well, I didn't count before giving you those numbers. I gave you my feelings, which were way high. It's 1 second for Pages. Libre is too inconsistent to give a number.

It's the story of open-source on Mac. Projects will have an anemic userbase. After all, most Mac users wouldn't be caught dead with Temu MS Word. This means the apps have very poor performance on Mac. No one is filling bug reports.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#313
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.

> that all goes under a single unhelpful name (Copilot) This isn't even a new dumb move for Microsoft. In the early 2000s, they applied the .NET brand to lots of random things that were completely unrelated to the runtime/framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_.NET_strategy

And ActiveX before that. It literally just meant self-activating COM objects but came to include a scripting host, OLE, CDO, and a multimedia framework.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#314
post #294

Microsoft making questionable decisions lately, the official RDP client on Mac was renamed to "Windows App" some weeks ago. It's hard to come up with a worse name, Windows App is what I name any software product that runs natively on Windows. RIP all the helpdesk employees who have to explain this to end users

> all the helpdesk employees

They should just tell people to use Google's Chrome remote desktop.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#315
post #269
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel has interesting new features. It’s the only reason I'm contemplating upgrading.

Would you mind writing down some of the exciting new Excel features? I am asking as an Excel user that 5 years ago used to love this tool (so much so that I would have paid for Excel if my employers did not provide it for free). Excel 2010 was peak Excel for me. PS. Nobody I know uses Excel's Turing-complete Lambda-calculus. None of my former colleagues in Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, Investor Relations, FP&A u…

XLOOKUP, XMATCH, dynamic arrays and related functions. There are also new regex functions, but it seems that those didn’t make the cut for Excel 2024, unfortunately. I had situations in the past where lambdas would have been handy.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only did the megacorp CEO's drop the ball on AI... we've got them gloating over widespread firing of engineers due to AI and then quotes like "I'm good for my $80B" like its his own personal money bag. And now they're force feeding crappy alpha AI products. The egos are well out of hand. And they give this group the name "The Magnificent Seven". WTF have we become. We trust these companies to be stewards of AGI/A…

So much this, when you see Zuck or even Jensen Huang saying "software engineers won't be needed anymore" and being excited about it you get pissed off as a software engineer lol. I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do" so it doesn't surprise me that 365 went the same way. I'm saying this and I'm a person that's usua…

>I feel like Microsoft's whole thing with Windows 11 has been "just force the users to do what we want them to do, we know better than they do"

My biggest gripe about Win11 is they stole from us the ability to move the task bar. It can ONLY be pinned to the bottom of the screen now. For the longest time, I was a top of the screen taskbar user. From what I've read, they have no plans to implement or change this "feature".

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#318
post #219

Aren't all Microsoft launches disasters?

At least the one where they tried to demo some voice recognition and it went pear-shaped, must have been some twenty years ago.

PS: 2006 https://slashdot.org/story/06/07/29/1258212/vista-speech-rec...

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#319

This is an excellent opportunity to tell our friends and family: It's time to consider switching to --==[[ LIBRE OFFICE! ]]==-- because: 1. It's a very good office suite that isn't subject to "fashionable remakes" and other Microsoft shenanigans. 2. over 100 million people use it - mostly on Windows and many on Linux and Mac. 3. No AI! And it certainly doesn't keep track of what you do, and it doesn't call home to te…

It does suffer slightly from looking like it was developed in the 90s. The UI kit it uses by default looks very out of place on most modern platforms and despite their being other UIs available, most end users will look at the default and choose something else, likely office. They need to invest some time in modernising the human interface parts of the suite.

Re: The Microsoft 365 Copilot launch was a disaster

#320
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly disappointing and somewhat strange that they didn't go this route. IP barriers?

Because _everyone hated it_. Now, it seems that everyone also hates copilot, but there is no point pre-dooming it by bringing the dread paperclip back from hell.

Wait, was this prophecy from a decade ago ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4taIpALfAo

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