At the start of the New Year, with no warning, Microsoft gives its flagship productivity app a name change and a huge price increase. Why would the company make this mess? I asked Copilot, who explained it very well.

At the start of the New Year, with no warning, Microsoft gives its flagship productivity app a name change and a huge price increase. Why would the company make this mess? I asked Copilot, who explained it very well.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    48·
    1 day ago

    They’re desperately trying to justify the absurd amounts of money they’ve been sinking into the AI bubble.

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      I’ve never even looked at it that way. I’ve always thought of it as something managers would find to be an ultimate value add.

      They overestimate how impressive their chatbots are and assume they can charge everyone a pretty penny for it. The massive costs are just a means to this end.

      That’s how it’s always looked to me anyway.

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    21·
    1 day ago

    Just goes to prove even with infinite money you can build successful software. It’s been a long time since MS created software that people love. The only current exceptions I can think of are not consumer products, but developer products: vscode and typescript.

    • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
      15·
      1 day ago

      A kind reminder that neither MS DOS, Age of Empires, excel or powerpoint where made by Microsoft but bought to steer them from the competition.

    • kippinitreal@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      infinite money you *can’t build successful software

      Typo?

      If so, that’s a good point! Though vscode source is open & so is typescript. With community input it evolves into what the community wants, not what the sales teams understand consumers want… or want them to want lol.

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Yes. I don’t know why, but I make this typo so often. I think my keyboard sometimes auto corrects can’t to can.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Debloated and castrated W10 is not as shitty as older systems if you look at it now, PowerShell is kinda neat and useful, standalone Office apps are slowly getting better and the corruption of their interfaces happened more than a decade ago in Vista times. I like Win+Shift+S screenshot shortcut, Win+arrow movement of windows, middle-mouse scrolling that I can’t correctly emulate on Linux. Their driver storage and search made plug-n-play less of a joke than it was before, like 50% of the time you don’t even need to look for drivers. Your fresh installation media usb stick can also serve for in-place update if you click its’ Setup.exe while booted, and it helped me to unfuck a lot of borked systems. All of these come wirh a lot of shit, but, like, w10 era before co-pilot was a golden age for Win PCs, and it also brought a shared subscription between their xbox consoles and pcs. And if they worked on top of that, improved it, I could’ve stayed there. But they did everything to make me switch to Linux, and with further downgrades, ads and neuro-bullshit I’m happy I got the best MS did and wasn’t there to experience their products at their worst.