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The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that
by BirAdam 6mo ago
The only Microsoft products I’ve actively heard people desire within the last 5 years are VSCode and Excel. Microsoft have so severely damaged their brand that they’ve finally shed the image of oddly gray Dell midtowers running XP on Pentium 4.
- bdangubic 6mo agothis is true only on HN. in reality, if you wanted a job where you did not use microsoft products you’d probably have to get a wrench and start doing plumbing work :)
- lpcvoid 6mo agoNah, especially in technology it's very easy to avoid Microslop. I've done it successfully for many, many years.
- bdangubic 6mo agopossible, sure. easy, I would disagree. starting with government and any government contracting through most enterprises. startups etc perhaps but avoiding msft severely limits your options
- Zambyte 6mo agoUsing Microsoft products and desiring Microsoft products are not the same thing.
- bdangubic 6mo agoI for sure misread the post I commented on, you are right, my bad!!
- rr808 6mo agoI work in big financials. Everything used to be built on Excel. A lot still is but Python/Jupyterhub or custom applications has taken over a lot of the complex stuff. Excel isn't really essential any more.
- slaymaker1907 6mo agoWhile less necessary with AI, Excel is still the king of data entry and basic data manipulation (sorting, filtering, updating, etc.). I’d say that SQLite with a GUI for visualization is a far stronger competitor than Jupyter at those sorts of things. You can do that stuff in Jupyter, but it’s easier in Excel. Jupyter also has a janky execution model. It doesn’t track dependencies so you have to be very careful in how you separate cells from one another and just running the whole notebook every time seems kind of pointless vs just writing a pure Python script.
- 1718627440 6mo agoYeah, I thought an application that works like Excel, but instead of "infinite" grids you get to declare finite rows/columns with types. Extending and inserting rows feels like a non-issue. This would also enable to have multiple tables on a single view. It's essentially a merge of Excel and SQL.
- retired_account 6mo agoNot sure they count as “products” in this context, but TypeScript and Playwright are still nice.
- ivanjermakov 6mo agoAnd LSP, but because of TypeScript.
- tempaccount5050 6mo agoThe last company I worked for had copilot pretty well integrated into M365/Sharepoint/Teams. It didn't really help me get more work done but it was pretty clutch at finding information. "What meeting did we discuss such and such for X project?" And it'd get me the meeting with the notes and recording. "Which SharePoint site do the docs for that live in?" Etc. That was about all it was good for though.
- marcosdumay 6mo agoCopilot on Teams has become pretty good at transcribing meetings. What's a shame, because the previous system was very funny.
- tomjen3 6mo agoWindows is still the king for gaming. Word is better than Google Docs for anything but the absolute basics[0]. But as a professional, it has no further use. [0]: Please tell me how I add a new paragraph style in Docs?
- oneeyedpigeon 6mo agoI don't think you can add a new paragraph style in Docs. However, 99% of people I've known to use a word processor have never used that feature. Heck, I'd bet the majority of users don't even understand what a 'style' is; people just change the font size directly.
- tomjen3 6mo agoYou are right on both counts and that is a bad thing. World has had ctrl+b for bold forever, so people can start to use it and then upgrade to styles when they run into the limitations. Alternatively someone knowledgable could set Word to only allow a selection of styles. Open and Libreoffice has had style support since forever. Its only docs that kneecaps its users learning journey like that.
- Anamon 6mo agoNot sure if it qualifies as a "product", but .NET is (these days) uncharacteristic for Microsoft as well. It's community-driven, very active, and quite liked by the people who use it. Somewhat more niche, I'd also add Access to the list. There is worryingly little development going on these days, but after all these decades there is no other product who came even remotely close to its quality. For quick local RDB stuff and some RAD, nothing is as quick and reliable. I still use it for all of my personal collection tracking, data modeling and prototyping for hobby projects, etc. The speed at which I can set up and adjust is unreal. I appreciate that LibreOffice are giving it a try with Base, but every time I try it, it takes me about 2 minutes until I find a basic, essential feature that's severely broken. (I guess I know which project I should start contributing to if I ever got into the mindset of doing some open-source work.)