Microsoft Puts Office Online Server on the Chopping Block

They only took uh... 6 years to finally let you move the annoying bar when you're screen sharing, which always gets in the damn way of either a browser tab you need, or hitting Debug in Visual Studio. Drove me to hatred of Teams.

I also really hate that "Teams" within Teams don't have normal text channels like Slack or Discord, they're forums. I can't stand this design choice and refuse to use it.

It's such a frustrating app where the bar to entry was insanely low. I do like their office integration, but its like, well you couldn't have butchered that up.

"Modern" in my mind has come to mean:

* Designed at the highest possible level, on top of multiple layers of frameworks, libraries, and dependencies that the developers do not fully understand.

* Full of anti-patterns that implicate privacy and security in a variety of ways.

* Designed as a walled garden, offering hobbled interoperability with other solutions, while attempting to vertically integrate features better implemented elsewhere -- or, in some cases, the exact opposite: designed as an excessively minimal solution, leaving concerns that should be addressed within its own scope unhandled.

* Unlikely to be viable for long-term deployment due to high time sensitivity in its dependencies; correspondingly fragile in ways that aren't fully accounted for.

* Built with a UI adhering to no coherent design patterns, targeting the presumed ability limits of people who will never likely use the product, while being wholly insufficient for those who actually do.

* Released prematurely with half-implemented features, unmitigated bugs, and incomplete documentation.

* Overhyped to the point that the majority of public discussion about the project consists of vague, unverifiable bullshit.

Teams was an unmitigated dumpster fire during its first ~4 years of existence, but I'd argue it's quite reasonable now. This is my favorite feature:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

I really miss this in places like Discord.

I used to say "follow the money", now it's more like "follow the promo" because of today's promo-driven culture.

I don't get this strategy, honestly.

There's plenty of sensitive environments that need to be air-gapped from the internet where Microsoft's products dominate.

They seem to be giving up on that market entirely.

There are worse alternatives.

It always amazes me that it usually takes 10 seconds to fully render a result page when I use Office 365 search to look for internal resources. Apparently people at Microsoft think this is acceptable.

Sharepoint is the ultimate form of productivity theater for managers. It feels like you're doing a lot, and it's specifically designed to give managers that dopamine rush they're looking for, but the reality is they're basically doing nothing. The site is impossible to navigate, and they may as well be playing candy crush instead of organizing folders and creating custom "pages".

I use it for chat, for which it's absurdly heavy-weight but it's what everyone else in the office uses, and to be a fly on the wall at various meetings. That's about it. It's not terrible. All virtual meeting platforms suck, and Teams isn't notably worse than any of them that I've used.