Criminal behaviour is in Windows’ very DNA. Microsoft openly taking advantage of its customers and treating them like cattle is perfectly on brand for them. Always has been. Always will be. Windows and Office only gained traction via nefarious acts on Microsoft’s part and now we live in a world where Microsoft is relevant.
If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.
The version of windows you get for software development at a company that needs windows for software development is pretty good, no sign of any adware or bloatware, no phoning home, no sus telemetry or updates forced by microsoft.
It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.
I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day.
They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
Windows 11 has been out for like 6 years and they still haven't fixed a major File Explorer bug: after a few minutes of File Explorer being open the menu bar for the old File Explorer pops up underneath the new thing that replace the menu bar; none of the buttons on this weird artifact from the past work. It's just there. Re-open File Explorer and it goes away, until a few minutes later and it re-appears.
Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
Silly that the error message doesn't convey that, right?
I recently got added to a company's Teams account as a guest. I do a bit of software contract work and have used Slack with no issue until now, this is what Teams show me:
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
I'm not so sure about that. For a while now I've worked at companies where PC users could use desktop Office but Mac users had to use the Web version. I think that Office for Mac might actually be a largely separate codebase - there are also significant feature differences between it and the PC version.
First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.
Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.
This is a good time to point out that Microsoft’s tiers and pricing for Microsoft 365 is completely insane as far as the overwhelming number of different ways to fundamentally buy the exact same software.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
I recently was building out on azure and oh boy, the joy of microsoft products.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
How can they force you to not use Thunderbird mail? If I use Thunderbird mail to send an email to an Exchange user, would it be blocked? How about vice versa?
Skill issue, this is why I mainline a macbook pro, a windows shitbox laptop and my kubuntu katana mega riced XPS. Yeah, I also walk about with a live cd.
I've seen this and I think it's actually a bug. I have mac computers at work and occasionally this will crop up and typically signing out and back in resolves the issue.
I do like Typst, but Typst isn't really ideal for diagrams... you could use it that way but I don't think it's ideal. Mermaid or PlantUML are better/cleaner options.
Agreed. My resume and slides are all templated with Typst, but I can't be bothered trying UML languages to make diagrams that'll probably be referenced once or twice a year, if ever.
Outlook for Windows used to be great in the 90s and early 2000s. Since then all they have done is added new bugs. And the latest version is HTML/JavaScript in a WebView, no longer native Windows.
Henrique should take it up to his university. When I was a student, mine used to provide me with an account that could use desktop apps on Windows and Mac. Educational institutions get very cheap license bundles compared to enterprises btw.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software.
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Unfortunately, universities have entrenched with Word documents that cannot format correctly on any FOSS solution, or even on the web version of M365 Word. I have tried, so many times, to request form compatibility at least with the web app. Not going to happen.
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
Less angry than this, but I’ve started needing to use windows for a project, and it’s hilarious how terrible everything is. From constant notifications about everything - everything everywhere all the time - to horrifically overly complicated UI where the one setting you need is in 10 menus and 45 tree nodes to onenote and copilot constantly reseting themselves and asking me to log in to something I dont care about. I truely wonder how anyone can use this all day and get anything done.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
This is the end result of capitalism and the demand for endless growth. Line must go up. If you want to avoid the extraction machine, use source software at parity or create new open source solutions with LLMs.
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
I've said this before, but Microsoft has a bizarre reality distortion field where people will simply forget the bullshit they put up with with their software.
People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history.
Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore.
I've been using university-licensed Office for a decade across several fresh MacOS Installs. Only in the last year have I started frequently receiving "sign-in to verify license" nags not unlike the OP's. These also cripple editing functionality until you sign in, forcing you to do the 2FA dance every time. The same rot afflicts mobile apps lately. It's such bad taste to perform license checks this aggressively.
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.
Microsoft is a parasite, a tick that lives off of consumer blood. They fucked up hard with internet, mobile, cloud, gaming, hardware and now with AI. No good can come from this company, ever.
A change in management at my work as decreed that we are all in on M365 and Azure. So will be migrating from Google Workspace, AWS EC2 & Aurora, and Cloudflare. Man it looks painful.
It will be interesting to see how I do with my Linux desktop...
I also hate Microsoft.
What they did to windows is criminal. I honestly cannot believe the state of windows 11. I will never work a job again where I have to use windows.
Criminal behaviour is in Windows’ very DNA. Microsoft openly taking advantage of its customers and treating them like cattle is perfectly on brand for them. Always has been. Always will be. Windows and Office only gained traction via nefarious acts on Microsoft’s part and now we live in a world where Microsoft is relevant.
Criminal all the way down.
It's a soft line in the sand for me as well.
If a job pays really really well, then sure I will run Windows, but short of that I'm going to opt for Mac, or I'm going to try and figure out a way to replace the Windows with a Linux.
The version of windows you get for software development at a company that needs windows for software development is pretty good, no sign of any adware or bloatware, no phoning home, no sus telemetry or updates forced by microsoft.
It looks like your license only allows for the web version, so your university probably isn't spending that much for it. You'd get the same message on Windows too.
I think this overlooks the full picture. It's not about the this one pin prick relating to their license. It's that working with Microsoft in any capacity is filled with paper cuts like this, annoyances, bad design, and overt errors. Every single day.
They're a User hostile company and they make a buck by doing just enough to convince non-experts to keep their enterprise licenses.
Windows 11 has been out for like 6 years and they still haven't fixed a major File Explorer bug: after a few minutes of File Explorer being open the menu bar for the old File Explorer pops up underneath the new thing that replace the menu bar; none of the buttons on this weird artifact from the past work. It's just there. Re-open File Explorer and it goes away, until a few minutes later and it re-appears.
Not as noticeable on light mode but a constant distracting reminder about how much Microslop sucks on dark mode.
Should have stayed with Windows 7!
Though, that's true of every single Microsoft-sized B2B-focused company I've ever encountered, as well as the one I once worked at.
I honestly would not attribute it to malice. I would attribute it to the scale of the company and the nature of the business they're in. A behemoth this size naturally has the "left hand doesn't know what the right one is doing" problem on an unfathomable scale simply because it's far too big for any one person to keep track of more than a small fraction of everything.
And then throw on top of it that they have a whole bunch of enterprise clients who can exert an incredible amount of pressure on individual decision makers. And there will never, ever be a Steve Jobs like figure who's willing to help them hold the line against that in the name of a sensible and coherent overall product vision because maintaining a sensible and coherent overall product vision does not generate positive ROI for this kind of company. Microsoft tried to have one several times during its "envious of Apple" days and every time the enterprise customers who actually supply their revenue responded by swatting them on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
Silly that the error message doesn't convey that, right? I recently got added to a company's Teams account as a guest. I do a bit of software contract work and have used Slack with no issue until now, this is what Teams show me:
- Client says they added me already, but I have no email with an invite. Turns out I didn't have an account that had previously joined Teams with a personal account.
- But even after I created a teams account, due to the order of events (added to corp account as guest, then created a teams account), I still don't have access and need to be readded.
- I can't upload images on groups because I don't have OneDrive access, WTF?
- I cannot download transcripts of meetings I join because I don't have permission.
How bad can a software be? Really?
I'm not so sure about that. For a while now I've worked at companies where PC users could use desktop Office but Mac users had to use the Web version. I think that Office for Mac might actually be a largely separate codebase - there are also significant feature differences between it and the PC version.
Also, just quickly poking through their various enterprise plans (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...), I found several that offered Web & Windows but not Mac, and none that only allowed editing on Web like you describe.
It seems your plan wouldn't even allow editing on Windows. Your university seems to be just paying for web versions.
First, doesn't Microsoft give away M365 for free to educational institutions? (Perhaps that's only US institutions, though.) Second, isn't this how they bill their accounts — Business Basic doesn't get desktop apps and you need to pay more to use desktop apps? Third, did the OP try to open their document in LibreOffice? I think there's a legitimate criticism of the move from one-time lifetime purchases to the SaaS economy, but Microsoft isn't the only one who deserves criticism for this.
Perhaps Microsoft is the biggest one though? (Who could possibly be bigger?)
Perhaps Google would be bigger? They don't even have desktop app offerings and the consumer versions are subsidized with your advertising data. They certainly weren't the first to introduce the pattern. I feel like Adobe was one of the first big providers to move from lifetime licenses to subscriptions.
Alternative headline: my university had bought a (cheaper?) plan which doesn't tick all necessary boxes.
This is a good time to point out that Microsoft’s tiers and pricing for Microsoft 365 is completely insane as far as the overwhelming number of different ways to fundamentally buy the exact same software.
I realize they’re trying to sell a productivity suite to basically every business on earth and that the complexity might at some point be necessary, but still…could be simpler.
I think the main point is that the existence of this box is a problem, not that someone forgot or deliberately chosen not to tick it.
You have to pay me to use Microsoft products and services.
The user experience gets worse with each passing year. A good product designer would see numerous flaws with in five minutes of using their office suite.
I recently was building out on azure and oh boy, the joy of microsoft products.
Their troubleshoot support tool must be the same team that makes it on local windows troubleshooter because literally every single time you use it, it spins for 10min then says it can't fix anything.
I had this same attitude and boy did they pay me (or my startup) to use azure, they gave us shit load of free credits I couldn’t resist.
But at the same time my university is forcing us to use Exchange for email. I have no way around that and Office 365 and Teams are default softwares. I hate it but I can’t do anything about it.
How can they force you to not use Thunderbird mail? If I use Thunderbird mail to send an email to an Exchange user, would it be blocked? How about vice versa?
Skill issue, this is why I mainline a macbook pro, a windows shitbox laptop and my kubuntu katana mega riced XPS. Yeah, I also walk about with a live cd.
based
I've seen this and I think it's actually a bug. I have mac computers at work and occasionally this will crop up and typically signing out and back in resolves the issue.
I think one of the more insane things Microsoft have done is their product management of MS Visio.
It became so insanely expensive my work started making us apply for 3 month licenses until we gave up and found something else.
About 15 years ago my Industry was using MS Visio for every diagram.
But they updated the GUI entirely and nobody could be bothered with the new format.
Now people use DrawIO and MS Visio is forgotten.
I don't know what you're doing and I feel all of your Visio pain, but have you tried typst?
I do like Typst, but Typst isn't really ideal for diagrams... you could use it that way but I don't think it's ideal. Mermaid or PlantUML are better/cleaner options.
Agreed. My resume and slides are all templated with Typst, but I can't be bothered trying UML languages to make diagrams that'll probably be referenced once or twice a year, if ever.
Similar story. We moved to DrawIO desktop. I now also use it as a replacement for whiteboarding and have it open in most meetings.
Outlook is the new Lotus Notes
Outlook for Windows used to be great in the 90s and early 2000s. Since then all they have done is added new bugs. And the latest version is HTML/JavaScript in a WebView, no longer native Windows.
An Apple user complaining about this? Oh that is rich!
I don't condone or like this kind of thing from MS. We all know though who MS copies...
You support the company that perfected it. So pot meet kettle.
Except Apple’s products tend to be at the very least good. The baseline for Microsoft products, however, is unusable.
This is more about the Office 365 admin configuration settings than about Microsoft's products themselves.
"Why do people still buy Microsoft?" Because admins can make weird configuration settings.
Henrique should take it up to his university. When I was a student, mine used to provide me with an account that could use desktop apps on Windows and Mac. Educational institutions get very cheap license bundles compared to enterprises btw.
(Also funny that he says we should not use proprietary software, but ignores his own usage of macOS.)
The point is that OS specific licenses shouldn’t exist. Especially when Microsoft makes Word and Windows.
Is this loosely in regards to the US Cloud Act? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AUpASjLV0E
Don't forget: https://www.libreoffice.org/
I purchased a "perpetual" license for Office 2019 for Mac some years ago. In the last few months, a key certificate expired, and completely bricked the software.
MSFT is well aware of the issue, but has decided that they are no longer supporting Office 2019, despite the "perpetual" license.
This is clearly planned obsolescence and false advertising. A state AG should investigate.
That's a competing OS issue, not a perpetual Office issue (2013 is still running fine for me, but best not to open untrusted docx)
This is cloud-era software philosophy. The device isn't yours. The software isn't yours. You are not a sovereign in your private space.
It was a choice, made by product designers and government regulators. They came from an ethos that had no respect for individual human dignity and self-determination.
The good news, though, is that it's mostly the software layer we're interacting with. And software has become so very much easier and cheaper to build. And it is easier still to take software that's built already and make it yours (as long as it's open source). These things can all come together to end the cloud age, if we want them to.
We can, right now, and individually, choose to use software that is ours. The chains that were real - that software required lots of people to build and proprietary formats were hard to interoperate with - are gone. We just have a learned helplessness problem from spending the last 15-20 years under those chains.
Well, Baby steps I guess?
Might I suggest you familiarize yourself with myriad open source options. Let me guess, you have an iPhone too.
Unfortunately, universities have entrenched with Word documents that cannot format correctly on any FOSS solution, or even on the web version of M365 Word. I have tried, so many times, to request form compatibility at least with the web app. Not going to happen.
I have a Windows VM with Word installed, just so I can fill in stupid institutionalised forms :( Drives me nuts.
Less angry than this, but I’ve started needing to use windows for a project, and it’s hilarious how terrible everything is. From constant notifications about everything - everything everywhere all the time - to horrifically overly complicated UI where the one setting you need is in 10 menus and 45 tree nodes to onenote and copilot constantly reseting themselves and asking me to log in to something I dont care about. I truely wonder how anyone can use this all day and get anything done.
The one thing Ill give it is at least you can still run a binary with having to pay $200 for the privilege to compile an application.
What have we become?
This is the end result of capitalism and the demand for endless growth. Line must go up. If you want to avoid the extraction machine, use source software at parity or create new open source solutions with LLMs.
Microsoft will always optimize for the share price and enterprise value. Their incentives are not your incentives. If you don’t want to be squeezed by Microsoft, stop using Microsoft products and use alternatives whenever possible.
Why do people still use microslop in the age of ai?
I've said this before, but Microsoft has a bizarre reality distortion field where people will simply forget the bullshit they put up with with their software.
People will (correctly) complain about jankiness and bullshit associated with Linux, but simply forget that Windows Update bricked their computer because their developers do not understand secure boot, or how they broke copypaste, or how they broke Notepad, or how the Windows "Repair Tools" have never worked for anyone in history.
Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not going to pretend it's perfect, but I do feel like I still put up with less garbage from it than people do with Windows. Also, even if I do get some garbage from it, you know what's cool? Snapshots actually work, something you cannot say about Windows System Restore.
Bit of a shameless bit of self-promotion, but.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746401
I don't understand why the author thinks that Apple is any better than Microsoft.
Heck, you can use cracked Windows on any compatible machine. Can you do that with MacOS? Apple is selfish, it wants to control the entire chain.
We*
We Hate You Microsoft.
I've been using university-licensed Office for a decade across several fresh MacOS Installs. Only in the last year have I started frequently receiving "sign-in to verify license" nags not unlike the OP's. These also cripple editing functionality until you sign in, forcing you to do the 2FA dance every time. The same rot afflicts mobile apps lately. It's such bad taste to perform license checks this aggressively.
Teams is also flaky on the Mac. About 1 in 4 times I join a call Teams gets stuck and I either must restart it or use the browser (which never fails). This has recurred across multiple physical Macs.
Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.
Microsoft is a parasite, a tick that lives off of consumer blood. They fucked up hard with internet, mobile, cloud, gaming, hardware and now with AI. No good can come from this company, ever.
A change in management at my work as decreed that we are all in on M365 and Azure. So will be migrating from Google Workspace, AWS EC2 & Aurora, and Cloudflare. Man it looks painful.
It will be interesting to see how I do with my Linux desktop...