I thought office 2003 was when it started going downhill. I preferred the UI from 2000 and prior, then suddenly it was like they were trying to hide everything from me
I heard a Microsoft engineer talking about that. “Intellimenus” they called it. Where, you clicked the Format menu and it was 56,004 entries long. So they compacted them, hid some options unless you further expanded the menu. Which is ALL the way wrongheaded.
When I still used MS office, most of my time using them was spent looking for the tools that I needed because they were so damn hard to find, and every major update moves them to a different fucking spot.
I will say that excel has always been a solid product, but I haven’t used it since Office for Mac 2004, which was a solid product. PowerPoint was also pretty good, back in the day. I hated Lotus 123, but I really do miss Lotus Notes. that was the preferred method of logging calls when I worked at Dell tech-support, and it was awesome.
But I am primarily a designer, so as someone who heavily relied on professional page layout tools like Quark and, later, Adobe InDesign, so I have a special burning place in my heart for Microsoft Word— or, rather, what it became.
I could handle word 6.0, but after that, it was just a monster.
Oh, and fuck outlook.
I’d rather like Apple’s Pages app. Simple, clean, and purely functional.
Checks out, i’m too young to consciously have experienced any of those four (and later never been interested in any version of a flight simulator) and have yet to come across a version that is any good. Funnily the best Microsoft products were only considered good after they replaced it with a shittier version (eg win xp, win 7) and the good product was only relatively good in comparison to the new product. I did use a lot of msn though, but that was only good because no used an alternative.
Both Plex and Kodi are forks of the original XBMC. Its legacy lives on.
The Windows Phone tile interface was quite interesting from a conceptual UX and aesthetic standpoint, but Microsoft didn’t implement it very well, and the software itself had some serious issues, both in performance and from an architectural perspective. Then, of course, was the lack of app support, while developers rushed to support the iPhone.
.NET turned out to be pretty good… eventually. Mind you, it still has ridiculous parts like none of the GUI toolkits it ships with being crossplatform (except WinForms, barely). But compared to other development platforms it’s not really worse than the rest.
Of course they’re also not really selling it. The related programs they do sell (like Visual Studio and Azure DevOps) absolutely suck.
RIP the Microsoft Chair beta test announcement. We don’t do physical packaging anymore, so the punchline (“This isn’t the first time Microsoft has sent us a shrink-wrapped stool sample.”) no longer works.
That joke was all the rage towards the end of the 1900s
Does hold up well, though. Has real staying power
Unlike most of Microsoft’s products…
Which is ironic because towards the end of the 90s is when Microsoft had the only 4 products of theirs that were any good:
I can’t recall them ever producing anything else of value
MS Office especially Word and Excel. They started fucking it up at the 365 era but Office 2003 was solid.
I thought office 2003 was when it started going downhill. I preferred the UI from 2000 and prior, then suddenly it was like they were trying to hide everything from me
I heard a Microsoft engineer talking about that. “Intellimenus” they called it. Where, you clicked the Format menu and it was 56,004 entries long. So they compacted them, hid some options unless you further expanded the menu. Which is ALL the way wrongheaded.
When I still used MS office, most of my time using them was spent looking for the tools that I needed because they were so damn hard to find, and every major update moves them to a different fucking spot.
I will say that excel has always been a solid product, but I haven’t used it since Office for Mac 2004, which was a solid product. PowerPoint was also pretty good, back in the day. I hated Lotus 123, but I really do miss Lotus Notes. that was the preferred method of logging calls when I worked at Dell tech-support, and it was awesome.
But I am primarily a designer, so as someone who heavily relied on professional page layout tools like Quark and, later, Adobe InDesign, so I have a special burning place in my heart for Microsoft Word— or, rather, what it became.
I could handle word 6.0, but after that, it was just a monster.
Oh, and fuck outlook.
I’d rather like Apple’s Pages app. Simple, clean, and purely functional.
Checks out, i’m too young to consciously have experienced any of those four (and later never been interested in any version of a flight simulator) and have yet to come across a version that is any good. Funnily the best Microsoft products were only considered good after they replaced it with a shittier version (eg win xp, win 7) and the good product was only relatively good in comparison to the new product. I did use a lot of msn though, but that was only good because no used an alternative.
The original Xbox was fucking awesome, even more so if you jail broke it.
Windows Phone was arguably great too. Absolutely superb interface that really set it apart from iOS and the Android clones of the time.
Both Plex and Kodi are forks of the original XBMC. Its legacy lives on.
The Windows Phone tile interface was quite interesting from a conceptual UX and aesthetic standpoint, but Microsoft didn’t implement it very well, and the software itself had some serious issues, both in performance and from an architectural perspective. Then, of course, was the lack of app support, while developers rushed to support the iPhone.
.NET turned out to be pretty good… eventually. Mind you, it still has ridiculous parts like none of the GUI toolkits it ships with being crossplatform (except WinForms, barely). But compared to other development platforms it’s not really worse than the rest.
Of course they’re also not really selling it. The related programs they do sell (like Visual Studio and Azure DevOps) absolutely suck.
Ironically, merging the NT kernel into Windows made Windows better, but also made NT worse.
I must have been in a coma for these magical few years when NT didn’t suck.
Where did I say NT didn’t also suck?
RIP the Microsoft Chair beta test announcement. We don’t do physical packaging anymore, so the punchline (“This isn’t the first time Microsoft has sent us a shrink-wrapped stool sample.”) no longer works.
You wouldn’t download a stool sample.
Old Bash.org quote (probably not the originator)
<Lunchbox> The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn’t suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.