4 ms·

RIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation. Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears imm

by xnx 2y ago

RIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation. Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.

genter 2y ago
> Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. So yeah, if you have any Publisher files, you're fucked.
- tchbnl 2y ago
  I wonder when exactly Microsoft dropped mask and actively decided to fuck over paying customers on the regular. They have zero respect for their users.
  - howthewut 2y ago
    [dead]
  - userbinator 2y ago
    IMHO Windows 8 era (~2012) is when things started to go down the drain noticeably quickly.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Including desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue. However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and even MFC, or plain Web, versus anything that builds on top of WinRT, unless the desired API is only available via WinRT.
      - gwervc 2y ago
        > WinRT It was obvious from day one that this would be a failure since it was strongly tied to the Metro UI (awesome on mobile, ugly as hell on desktop) and the Windows app store, all only available on an OS that never was competitive against its predecessor. Also it shipped with a .net implementation that was incompatible with the real one. I'm glad I skipped that tech entirely.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        It evolved over time, by the time Project Reunion was announced in 2020, it had gotten kind of ok. However, that incompatibility you point out, was present throughout all iterations. Window 8 => 8.1 => 10 required rewrites, UWP/WinUI 2.0 => Win32/WinUI 3.0 dropped .NET Native and .NET 9 still isn't full AOT, C++/CX => C++/WinRT lost Visual Studio tooling and is nowadays in maintenance mode, yet gets sold as being the way for C++ devs. Meanwhile, most of the faces on community meetings have changed since Windows 8 days, nowadays most seem fresh out of university without any Windows developer experience given the blank stares when questioned about feature XYZ becoming available, and bugs?, you only have to spend sometime digging around the Github repos. Naturally, even the strongest advocate eventually gives up.
bigtimesink 2y ago
I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.
- ohgr 2y ago
  Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
  - Arainach 2y ago
    "X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes. It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice. You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app. It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
    - ohgr 2y ago
      Well no it's not lazy at all. I'll tell you why. It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly. THAT is a complete dealbreaker. As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that. There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.
rkagerer 2y ago
Yeah, imagine after 10 years you reached into your toolbox to grab your hammer and it was gone. Along with your screwdriver, measuring tape, etc.
- RobotToaster 2y ago
  Some of the tools needed to work on modern cars and tractors require subscriptions apparently.
- netsharc 2y ago
  The hammer says "you need to update" as you pick it up, "downloads" an update (bonus: it fails for no reason) and when it does succeed, it turns to a pair of scissors, but you can get the hammer functionality with a subscription to "Scissors Pro Max, Enterprise Edition".
  - dessimus 2y ago
    To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement. Woodworkers and machinists probably spend as much time on tool upkeep as programmers do futzing with updates, new plug-ins, etc.
    - 12_throw_away 2y ago
      > To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement. And hey the only place left to get hammers sells 50 brands of identical, low quality hammers (all clearly made in the same factory) under a variety of inscrutable, all-caps brand names like AOXIUN and KUDUO. So actually maybe the advice for hammers and software is the same ... if you rely on it, make sure you can build it yourself.

by xnx 2y ago

RIP. I'm very thankful that the desktop version of Publisher should be able to run in perpetuity in emulation. Compare this to any SaaS app that disappears immediately.

genter 2y ago

> Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. So yeah, if you have any Publisher files, you're fucked.

tchbnl 2y ago
I wonder when exactly Microsoft dropped mask and actively decided to fuck over paying customers on the regular. They have zero respect for their users.
- howthewut 2y ago
  [dead]
- userbinator 2y ago
  IMHO Windows 8 era (~2012) is when things started to go down the drain noticeably quickly.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Including desktop development, as one ex-advocate for WinRT, which I considered to be what .NET 1.0 should have been in first place, given the original idea of COM+ Runtime vNext, they really messed up the whole development story multiple times, always demanding a rewrite as if that is a minor issue. However, nowadays, run away from anything that resembles WinRT tooling, keep to tried and true Win32, Forms, WPF, and even MFC, or plain Web, versus anything that builds on top of WinRT, unless the desired API is only available via WinRT.
    - gwervc 2y ago
      > WinRT It was obvious from day one that this would be a failure since it was strongly tied to the Metro UI (awesome on mobile, ugly as hell on desktop) and the Windows app store, all only available on an OS that never was competitive against its predecessor. Also it shipped with a .net implementation that was incompatible with the real one. I'm glad I skipped that tech entirely.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        It evolved over time, by the time Project Reunion was announced in 2020, it had gotten kind of ok. However, that incompatibility you point out, was present throughout all iterations. Window 8 => 8.1 => 10 required rewrites, UWP/WinUI 2.0 => Win32/WinUI 3.0 dropped .NET Native and .NET 9 still isn't full AOT, C++/CX => C++/WinRT lost Visual Studio tooling and is nowadays in maintenance mode, yet gets sold as being the way for C++ devs. Meanwhile, most of the faces on community meetings have changed since Windows 8 days, nowadays most seem fresh out of university without any Windows developer experience given the blank stares when questioned about feature XYZ becoming available, and bugs?, you only have to spend sometime digging around the Github repos. Naturally, even the strongest advocate eventually gives up.

bigtimesink 2y ago

I'm not sure if it's accurate, but a certain nautical themed torrent directory currently lists Office 2016 as the third most popular Application torrent.

ohgr 2y ago
Not surprised. Office 2016 is basically the "last" version of Microsoft Office. All the O365 stuff is pretty much regressive feature simplification over the top of it and in some cases abhorrent user hostile garbage (new outlook). O365 pretty much killed Office for us. We barely use it in house now. At best it's hosted email. We don't even use the calendar / contact stuff as it doesn't sync with any phones properly. Apple won there by a mile. If only they did an enterprise iCloud+ with custom domain we'd just stop paying for O365 I suspect other than for a couple of Excel die hards.
- Arainach 2y ago
  "X was the last version with any features" is among the laziest of internet tropes. It's fine to say that you don't like the subscription model, or the pricing, or telemetry, or "AI" thrown in everywhere, but saying that everything is "regressive feature simplification" is so obviously wrong and so easy to prove false that you're basically lying to our faces and pretending people won't notice. You can program Excel functions in JavaScript, greatly improving the power of things you can do (especially in the web UI). Excel haa gained SVG support, all sorts of improved functions (CONCAT, TEXTJOIN, SWITCH), funnel graphs, a dark theme, better Pivot Tables, viable coauthoring (even with Sharepoint or OneDrive, coauth on Excel 2016 was rough) and so much more. That's just one app. It's fine to say "I don't find this a good value" or "change X is a dealbreaker for me" but please don't degrade the conversation by telling obvious lies.
  - ohgr 2y ago
    Well no it's not lazy at all. I'll tell you why. It funnels you down the cloud route pretty heavily which is at least in what we do is incredibly dangerous and leads to regulatory problems. What we end up with is a nightmare tangle of GPOs where we don't know what feature is going to be turned on next in a trivial update which will end up with our mandatory signed in O365, because that's how you have to pay for it, pushing content to OneDrive or something. Even the file save dialogs switched a while back to push cloud first and we had a nightmare even though OneDrive was disabled (!) because no one could use it suddenly. THAT is a complete dealbreaker. As mentioned, the calendar and contact management is so bad that we ended up using iCloud anyway for that. There's also a better win for us which is moving to R with tidyverse. Less footguns, can work with people via a VCS fine, can wrap a whole data pipeline in automation in a makefile, doesn't go down for 2-3 days a year.

rkagerer 2y ago

Yeah, imagine after 10 years you reached into your toolbox to grab your hammer and it was gone. Along with your screwdriver, measuring tape, etc.

RobotToaster 2y ago
Some of the tools needed to work on modern cars and tractors require subscriptions apparently.
netsharc 2y ago
The hammer says "you need to update" as you pick it up, "downloads" an update (bonus: it fails for no reason) and when it does succeed, it turns to a pair of scissors, but you can get the hammer functionality with a subscription to "Scissors Pro Max, Enterprise Edition".
- dessimus 2y ago
  To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement. Woodworkers and machinists probably spend as much time on tool upkeep as programmers do futzing with updates, new plug-ins, etc.
  - 12_throw_away 2y ago
    > To be fair, if a hammer is sitting unused in a toolbox for 10 years, you might find it does "need an update", as the handle might have dried out and rotted, needing replacement. And hey the only place left to get hammers sells 50 brands of identical, low quality hammers (all clearly made in the same factory) under a variety of inscrutable, all-caps brand names like AOXIUN and KUDUO. So actually maybe the advice for hammers and software is the same ... if you rely on it, make sure you can build it yourself.