"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."

- Steve Jobs. 1996

I guess some things never truly change. And thst kind of" culture" is how you amass a cult following (it's in the word, "cult" ure).

Outside of early Xbox I can't think of many counterexamples to this.

Well, that's not quite fair. NT is a very interesting and definitely original kernel design, for example; NTFS is a file system with unique properties, and AJAX was an API devised at Microsoft (that one absolutely lacks taste, but at least it's an original idea).

That being said, I agree that the company and the brand evoke nothing but negative emotions in me, and I don't know anyone that would have anything better than "meh" on them.

Those are all technical implementation details, not product features that everyday users can develop an emotional attachment.

NT is a very interesting DEC VMS clone (developed by the same team). In fact 9x was much more original design.

As/is was 95% of Apple's "innovation" over Xerox, but here we are.

I will admit Jobs put "style" and "finish" on things that MS never does.

It switched from being a software company to a cloud provider about 10 years ago.

Things like Azure, LinkedIn and GitHub are where the focus is, since they have recurring revenue and also help them build their surveillance apparatus.

Windows and Office are legacy monopoly products, so all you’re going to see from those divisions are price hikes and more mandatory surveillance.

Edit: VS Code is an interesting play. It’s “free” because of the telemetry stream and built-in aggressive bundling of GitHub, Copilot, Codespaces, etc.

Well there is only so much you can do with Word and Outlook.

Let's be real the difference between Office 2024 and Office 2019 are largely cosmetic. That stuff stopped being exciting a long time ago.

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 use it.

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.

What about the super exciting new Teams and Outlook!

Exciting, and not in a good way.

Teams has popup ads inside the app itself. No, I don't give a bloody damn about whatever stupid new feature you're trying to force upon me when I'm in the middle of a deep conversation with a coworker.

I was trying to join a meeting in Teams from the calendar when up popped a “How are you enjoying Calendar” star rating dialog. I’ve never once listed “Office Calendars” amongst things that I enjoy. Much less now with this needy feedback blocking me from entering the meeting.

Those constant pop ups are super annoying

You mean super aggravating.

Do you suspect that their plan to use Windows 11 to force everybody onto hardware with a TPM is the result of:

> no vision, no direction, no soul, no plan, nothing

Based on their increasingly user-hostile decisions up to this point (re: tricking people into using edge, ads in the start menu, etc) it's pretty clear that the name of the game is to monetize their privileged position as OS vendor by selling their users out to the highest bidder.

I expect they want TPMs everywhere so that they can abuse the passkey protocol's "attestation statement" to include attestations to advertisers about the user themselves, rather than about the auth circumstances (which is what that field is for). Being able to expose details about the human on the other side of an otherwise anonymous browser session is big money for advertisers, and if everybody has a TPM Microsoft can cryptographically exclude competitors from that channel (they no longer have to care if you're using chrome instead of edge). As for the AI everywhere, that's how they'll get to know you so that there's something to sell.

They've got a lot of thought going into their product, it's just that none of that thought is for the benefit of their users. Which is why I heartily disagree with:

> I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft

They used to make relatively good desktop OS and Office software with a consistent UI/UX - Windows 2000/XP/7, Office 97/2000 (if you disable Clippy). Then IMHO it went downhill first slowly and now faster. May be people are still attached to the platform they used for years.

It seems like you get a promo for changing names of things. The more convoluted, the higher you get.

I wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have to assert their dominance by making a change just for the sake of making a change.

It's probably easier to get ahead by saying you launched a "new product", than "Office release 974".

I think when a company loses their founder, vision and leadership just aren't the same.

apple is also getting watered down. I don't think they've really come out with anything truly novel after sj passed away. In comparison to the ipod or iphone or ipad, the apple watch, vision, apple pay don't seem groundbreaking.

I find them easy to hate as I only use their products when I work for some company that has made the mistake of standardising on them.

If you don't hate microsoft after a few months of working remotely using Teams, Outlook etc, I'll be pretty impressed

>but I find it hard to feel any kind of strong emotion towards Microsoft

I use a bunch of their products, but I have a strong negative emotion towards them.

It does seem like their mainstream products are as tastelessly managed as ever.

But in the (small?) corner of developer products they've been pretty good: Typescript, VSCode, .NET/C#/F#, LSP, Lean are all great and very influential contributions.

I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages and somehow it has become completely unfit for purpose. Two series of data, one table of 300 cells containing one automatically extrapolated formula that multiplies the value of the cells in the series. A trivial spreadsheet use case that was solved 40 years ago. Changed the values in one series, and the table just... didn't update. Clicked into the cells and the formulas are right, they're referring to the right cells, it just doesn't update. I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?! How is such a fundamental feature of the spreadsheet so utterly broken?? You expect me to go and manually verify that all dependent cells have updated every time I change anything anywhere? Microsoft, you have failed at your most fundamental purpose, zero points awarded.

So yeah, I have some pretty strong feelings about Microsoft right now.

There is a setting in excel that disables auto calculation. This is useful for people who are (ab)using excel with massive data sets and crazy calculations. It sounds like this setting may have been on

Trust me, it wasn't. It was the first thing I checked. It was set to automatic mode.

The irony is something like 99.999% of spreadsheets in use today have zero calculations. People think of Excel primarily as a way to lay out text on two axes. It's mind-blowing but I see people write out a series of expenditures down a single column and then pull out a desk calculator, add them up, and enter the sum at the bottom

> I just tried to use Excel for the first time in ages … I edit the cell and hit enter without changing anything. That cell updates, the other 299 don't. What? What?!

You sure that wasn’t an operator error? Sounds like a pretty basic feature to not have working.

Trust me, I assumed I did something wrong. 20 minutes of investigation later, I exhausted every other reasonable possibility other than that the software is simply broken. Fun fact, the key combo to manually recalculate all cells is Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F9. That fixed it, but I'll never, ever trust Excel for anything again.