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Comment by wolvoleo | Hacker News Reader

Pretty insane how a company that knocked out office and visual studio in the scope of a year or so now has problems making a task bar moveable.

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I have to use sharepoint on ms edge for work. Today I had to search something up an on my 27" monitor, I had 7 fixed rows of non-content on the top (including the tab bar and the locator bar) and 3 fixed rows at the bottom: last one being the windows taskbar that I still cant move as 26H2 hasn't been deployed.

The actual search results were a scrollable list with 5 rows visible of the content I was searching for.

I wonder what skills must one posses to rise to places that give one the authority to make such decisions? Are there incentives that drive these or are these borne of Kafkaesque bureaucracies? Does no one object to such monstrosities? Are the ones responsible so bereft of empathy and/or common sense? I know this is meandering and pointless but I wonder and struggle to understand the thought processes. This apathy, sure it presents itself in something so mundane but it permeates everything. i guess its the human condition.

Ah, this could be a great study in organization design! Conway's law suggests that the software architecture resembles the organization. So there might not be any designers making such decisions. Probably lots of organizations can't use each others' toolbars but are expected to add their own toolbar?

Which year was Office (1988) and Visual Studio (1997) knocked out?

The late 90s. Office for dos is not what we know now. Office 98 was basically the same as what we have today, the improvements since then have been only incremental. And often worse like the ribbon. Visual studio came from this time too, they were really on a roll then.

Microsoft just stops investing in innovation once they take over a market. You saw it with IE, with office, with windows even.

There was never an MS Office for DOS. The first version was for the Mac.

There was a Word for DOS, but Word for Windows was a port of Word for Mac. Excel started on the Mac (their DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan). PowerPoint started out as a Mac product funded by Apple, which Microsoft acquired.

None of this can be described as "knocked out by Microsoft in a year".

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