Microsoft won't support Office apps on Windows 10 after October 14th

I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked.

I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues.

Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.

When I have to do something on Windows I use someone elses Win computer if possible.

Switching to a web based tool like freetaxusa.com means my last two links to Windows are online games with anti-cheat and iTunes backups.

This is pretty accurate. A bunch of disjointed orgs who get sometimes seemingly random direction from the overlord. The random direction isn't really random, it's whatever move the overlord believes investors will respond to.

Copilot is a great example - shoved ungracefully into every product with the effect of making basic tasks more difficult. But hey - early movement on LLMs makes the stock go up.

Office and Windows have been a decreasing proportion of Microsoft’s revenue for years. The real money is coming from cloud services in its many forms. Microsoft may not be #1, but they are clearly in a strong position with good growth. Specifically Microsoft is great at onboarding mid sized businesses onto Azure/Teams and then building a big enough moat to keep churn low.

Look at their growth numbers and you’ll see their business is in a strong position. Their cloud position is entrenched. Windows, Office, and Bing are all just bells and whistles to attract people to their real offerings (Teams, Azure, other subscriptions)

Also just realized I use LibreOffice anyways (or something similar) so I suppose this does not even apply to me

Is there any real competitor to Office 365? I know my current employer would never switch as we need an on-premise email server and that basically means Exchange.

Also, we can blame Microsoft for a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure if Office and Outlook didn’t exist people would find another way to spread ransomware …

macOS isn’t great these days either, it’s been downhill since somewhere around 10.13 I’d say. The last truly great release, imo, was 10.9.

There unfortunately isn’t a great OS answer if you just want a “regular computer,” from Apple or MS.

That's flat out not ok, end of conversation. This is not the 90s where a computer was obsolete in 6 months anymore.

Apple also deprecates hardware with new OS versions, but they don't do it to millions simultaneously. Additionally, they don't turn their entire previous OS into nagware about upgrading every time they release a new version.

So, less than 4 years of support for those machines.

This is the last private and secure way to use MS products. When that is gone, we’ll be stuck using fake f/oss wannabe-Excel.

It's annoying. A lot of features (video cropping, changing slide master title, ...) do not work in the online version. I literally had to ask a colleague to edit the slidemaster title for me.

Also, it's quite slow in loading pictures, videos.

If you don’t care about quality and aren’t an Office power user, they’re fine.