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oblioyesterday at 8:45 AM1 replyview on HN

Your circles are really small and echo-chamber-y.

Office was considered a very solid product for many generations. Windows 95 was loved. So were Windows 2000, Windows XP with the SPs, Windows 7, Windows 10.

.NET was the envy of the Java world for many years.

Microsoft had many duds but they also had some great products.

You can't sell as many products as they did without also having some good products.


Replies

tolcihoyesterday at 6:26 PM

> Office was considered a very solid product for many generations.

When was that? My introduction to Excel was in the 1990s when a scientist asked about data corruption, and my response was "oh, yeah, Excel does that, you need to fiddle with these options and hope the options do not get turned off, seeing as companies may randomly screw over user preferences". The look in their eyes...they probably had done a whole bunch of data entry before they even noticed the corruption. Anyways, a few decades later those genomes got renamed, for some reason or another. Other customers came to me and pleaded, please do not install Word 6, it's bad, and I was like, well, be that as it may, but Microsoft has broken the file format, again, so if someone sends you a Word 6 document you will not be able to read it. They've got you over the barrel, perhaps consider not using their software? Unless you like being chained to that main-mast, of course, don't shame the kink! Later on a coworker said, try Visio, and I was like, this is sort of bad, and they were like, yeah, it was better before Microsoft bought it. So, when was Microsoft not producing kusogeware? Sometime during the semi-mythical 80s, perhaps?