FrankForum (Frankness IS Forum)

Office 365, Bing, and many other MSFT products -- even if you don't use Windows or Windows 10 -- now have the same heinous provisions as in Windows 10.

Office 2016 ends up perhaps tangentially tainted. I tried to cover the basics, .

Overall significance and source text links and meaning, I tried to summarize, .

The basic point is, if you use ANY of the products listed , then you're covered by the same heinous provisions in aka.ms/msa as if you were using Windows 10. So you want to avoid those products, too.

Most importantly, since they can change the listing of 'covered services' at any time, to protect the data of clients, you just should avoid any new MSFT products altogether. For the old stuff, you already have a license, and that license governs. MSFT cannot change the old license without your consent, even as it cannot change the list without informing you.

So your best defense, is to avoid new MSFT products altogether, until someone on the lawyer team slaps the other lawyers upside the head for writing paragraphs 2, 3, 7 -- which are all lawsuits waiting to happen, ultimately unconstitutional in the US.

Ed Fries (then at Microsoft) was the guy who spearheaded Microsoft Word to beat WordPerfect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od_kGGW-Xq4

And as he explains, when he leaves the Office division to work on the Microsoft games division, the management was disappointed (however I'm grateful because he assisted Ensemble Studios with Age of Empires and a bunch of other products). What's interesting about it all though, is how Ed explains it was easier for him to work without 'excessive management' when he moved into the games division. It wasn't seen as a lucrative division, so he had free reign to do whatever. Of course ONCE it became successful, then management hounds down on it (just like when the Office division became successful).

Here's a bonus video where he talks about why he left Microsoft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkTIE2EHfpY

Julie Larson-Green doesn't have experience with computer products like Ed Fries, and probably doesn't understand the historical challenges with WordPerfect and Lotus. And if you don't understand those historical challenges and why certain things were designed a certain way, you'll make [wrong] decisions.

On that note I quite like Office 2007 (however I still use PowerPoint '03 because it has some graphical features that were removed in 2007 for whatever reason... thankfully they can be installed side-by-side). But quite honestly, I loathe Office 2013. It takes longer to load than any other office, the interface is horrible, aaaaand... customization features were removed that *were* present in 2010. Why?! Why remove features that people have used, like the visually impaired (there was a whole thread about people who increased the font size in specific windows of Outlook 2010 couldn't do it in 2013 anymore).

If I take your last paragraph and substitute '2003' for 2007 and '2010', and '2007' for '2013', you and I would have said the same thing.

2007 couldn't even print properly on an old HP 4050 printer. That ribbon was completely unintelligible, and in Win7 it is even worse.

I could turn the 2003 menu into a ribbon or anything of any structure I want. So if I were a Fortune 500 company, I could 100% customize 2003 Office, and I'm sure many did. Same, for XP.

That's why people don't 'upgrade', the employee retraining costs are high and the gain in productivity is zero.

Good points. Applies to the management competence, too. Current management in many companies is very low in quality, compared to 40 years ago. Website design, programming, many things are far inferior. Which, those now doing it don't know, because they don't know what it HAD BEEN.