No Windows 10, no Office 2019, says Microsoft Microsoft has revealed that Office 2019’s desktop applications will only run on Windows 10 – and shortened support for the forthcoming release of the suite. In an update published on February 1st, the company revealed that the beta apps for the perpetual version of Office 2019 – as opposed to the subscription Office 365 - will …
> [64K machines] There's no point trying to poke a ROM.
Eh, had both C64 and Atari 800XL at different points, both had 64K RAM installed and bank switching available between RAM and ROM for the various address spaces. IIRC on both models a poke would write directly to the RAM bank no matter which bank was selected for read at the time. Can't say about models from other manufacturers though.
random poking is fun. or at least amusing. heh.
Unless you own a Commodore Pet and don't mind slagging the display coils.
(I vaguely remember that poking random values into one location could make it try to use a much higher refresh value than the electronis would support and could sometimes blow the display..)
We cannot of course predict disruptive technology. Possibly by then the office desktop PC will be a relic, with just thin clients and server based applications where no-one actually has a office suite installed locally hence no sales. As existing solutions are all browser based, then it won't matter what platform they are on.
"Which is a bit inconsistent with news from the very same announcement that Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2018 will land “in the fall of 2018” and get five years of extended support."
No it isn't. The LTSB is for things like kiosks and appliances and Microsoft specifically state that if you need Office then you shouldn't be using Windows 10 LTSB. You should be using the CBB branch.
Time for OpenOffice, LibreOffice and any other Office variant to come in and take M$Office's place then?
Good luck with that.
I use OpenOffice at home for nearly everything. It works for me and has done for years. Where it won't work, is when some poor schmuck has to support 10,000+ middle managers and secretaries (of all genders) cluelessly trying to use the same short cuts, macros etc that they'd built up over a career of using MS Office. The costs involved in moving are greater than the costs of the perpetual licences, especially when bought in bulk.
Does OpenOffice do everything I need from an office suite? Yes, yes it does. But its not your IT-savvy users that you need to keep moving at the same pace, its the other crowd.
... Boom, it sure is.
I have deployed alternatives to MS Office before, once under the direction of a Head of Faculty who hated MS. So I started with his PA. She hated it, started crying, and threatened to quit. The other times were with PhD students, who ran Linux, and just got on with it. Horses for courses, and all that.
Where it won't work, is when some poor schmuck has to support 10,000+ middle managers and secretaries (of all genders) cluelessly trying to use the same short cuts, macros etc that they'd built up over a career of using MS Office.
If they can't learn to move on and experience new things, they deserve exactly what they get.
One in particular when you upgrade will happily remove the old version and then fail to begin installing the update if you don't have office.
I'm still cursing the fact that they wont provide support for it, if the core is not run on windows server, EVEN knowing it was deployed with the compact version of sqlserver. (I did have a MS Server free site)
The providers state that they will only support their product on Microsoft software that is currently in support.. Actually having it deliberately break if it isn't is rude at best, brown envelopes(err Marketing) at worst
If they can't learn to move on and experience new things, they deserve exactly what they get.
'They' don't get anything. Your business doesn't get profits because your productivity fell off a cliff. Your shareholders don't get dividends. Your share price drops and you don't get your financing rolled over. Your company goes bust.
If they'd always used OpenOffice it wouldn't be a problem, but they haven't. And it is.
Gotta call bullshit on that one. If there's one group ready to call Microsoft's bluff, it's small business owners. Either they turn to old hands like me to maintain legacy computers, often tied to some software package or three, or just plain pissed 'cause they're tired of being pissed on and switch to something else.
No, it's the medium or larger businesses or enterprises that can't afford to get up and leave their investments and human capital behind. Usually, although sometimes they do as well. And their workers have similar set ups at home that their families use as well. There's the lock in. And Microsoft knows it, as do I.
I'm in a separation phase in my relationship with Microsoft. Soon to be a divorce. Between their serial vulnerabilities from all vendors and the Wild West of the Internet turning into CounterStrike, and Microsoft's business moves, I can't take it any more. I've gone to a couple of tablets, one hooked up as a desktop (keyboard, mouse and 30" diplay) that I don't trust and if they get chomped, a factory rest or cheap replacement is simple.
That's where I'm at right now. Everything else lives off in another universe and that's rather a lot else. The hand writing of Microsoft started with them killing Technet subscriptions serial developer abuse, killing their "New Technologies" again and again, Windows 8 and 10, and finally Office 365 subscriptions extending into the corporate world.
Yep, that "New Technologies" is regurgitation of mainframe client-server rentals, right out of IBM's heyday in the '60's and '70's, the MS/AWS/GCP data center serving as the mainframe. Been there, done that, burned the "I'm Stupid" T-shirt. Generally not an option for the Rest of Us. <Waving bye-bye> to this Brave New World.
Ah, but sometimes some of these 'macros' or, shall we say, VBA are very useful in these applications.
I look around at the Excel documents that I use daily and wonder how I would get the job done without VBA at all. It's not just middle managers who use this stuff but people who, well, use the stuff and use it well.
Don't get me wrong. I am not a MS luvvie. I would happily ditch everything MS tomorrow if I could, if only someone were to port all my Visual Studio code, all of my Office stuff and everything Microsofty to something else. Truly I would, and I speak as a coder who has been suffering since the first days of Visual Basic.
But I accept that I am locked in and it's quicker for me to await personal retirement (I don't work for anyone else but make money from the various markets) than to recode everything. But that's not my point is: the point is that it's not all middle managers who use VBA. They have other ways to make your life hell.
I agree with BongoJoe, and AC above him seems a little removed from reality, to be polite.
I work in a mixed architecture, with Linux developers, who use VIM for coding and spend 90% of their time on the command line, we also have web developers, they work either on a Linux terminal server or Linux laptops (ThinkPad T series).
Half of the front-office staff use Linux, the other half Windows. Even the directors of the company are split 50-50 for their desktop.
We do have some Windows virtual machines around for testing, but the majority of servers are Linux based (Debian and Gentoo). I used Linux as a replacement for Windows back in the dreadful XP days, coming back to using Windows with 7 through 10. But I always kept a Windows XP PC around when I was working on Linux and I always kept Linux boxes around when working on Windows.
The Linux guys tend to poo-poo Windows and vice-versa. I tent to use the best solution for the job at hand. That means, generally, a lot of Windows on the front end and a good mix of Linux and Windows on the back end.
But Open Source software that is good, stable and relatively secure is as hard to find as it is with proprietary software on the Windows side. No program is perfect, they all have bugs and glaring security holes waiting to be unearthed.
Linux is good at patching, Windows is getting slowly better (at least you only need to install one update when you get a new Windows 10 PC, not the thousands of updates that can take days to install on a Windows 7 installed (thank God for WSUS-Offline, I rolled that out at my last job and we saved around 14 hours for a Windows 7 installation on new hardware - I also brought in imaging of the then finished standard installations, which meant a PC was ready to roll in about an hour).
Linux problem (and open source for other platforms as well) starts when you break outside of the pre-included packages that are in the official repositiroies. You have to start with tarballs and zip packages, okay, not too bad, but they can't check all dependencies, so you have to rely on the documentation, you start unpacking the tarball and run the installation script, which keels over with a cryptic error message that nobody has documented. The message is cryptic, but seems to point at a missing file.
A quick search of the web brings up a couple of forum posts for other packages which kick up the same error, the half of which are just single posts with people having this problem and no answer. A post for your package with this error doesn't exist. If you are lucky, you can work out what file is missing, so you hunt through the tarball and yes, it isn't there. You go through the distribution documentation, hoping to find which package it is in, only to find that the file has been depricated and hasn't been included in the last two releases of the OS, which either means no developer has touched the project you are trying to install for at least 18 months, or they is still developing against old versions of the operating system... Or they developed against a different distribution, where files and directories are in different locations, so you have to go though dozens of scripts adjusting paths and command names, re-writing configuration files.
Don't get me wrong I really like Linux and I like the concepts of open source software, but there are so many broken, poorly documented projects out there, that it is just cheaper to buy a Windows server and a proprietary package, because you spend less time trying to get it work, that the licenses for the software are cheaper than the time you have to spend researching the broken bits of the open source solution.
Often a mixture works great, I have used a lot of Linux mail gateways feeding into an Exchange server, for example. There are a lot of open source teamware products out there, but if you are using Windows and Office on the clients, Exchange is quick to deploy and easy to administer, compared to many of the open source alternatives.
LibreOffice also into a different category, if you are dealing purely with internal documents and don't need the collaboration tools provided by GSuite or MS Office, it is a great solution. If you need to exchange documents with other companies on a regular basis, who do not use LibreOffice, it can be a disaster - page breaks in the wrong place and a few formatting errors are the least of your problems; presentations are still the worst, I've had presentations turn up and halfway through the slides, I start noticing that the arrows linking different parts of processes are sitting in mid air (commical) or pointing in completely the wrong direction or to the wrong destination!
Windows 7 goes EOL in 2020 so most businesses that are wedded to the Office suite, and these are the vast majority of the customers, will probably moving to Windows 10 anyway. It's also not uncommon for companies to skip Office releases because document compatability is pretty good. One of my customers is still "happily" (the ribbon interface disqualifies the use of the word in the normal sense) using Office 2011 and I've seen no plans for a move to 2016 but Windows 10 migrations are planned for this year.
I like OpenOffice and use it for the majority of my own stuff but it's plumage is starting to suffer. Every time I try LibreOffice I get exasperated by the degraded UI and the odd bugs which invariably lead to crashes and data loss. It's a pity because there are some talentend and committed working on it but the project management is just shocking.
MS has worked hard on Office 2016 and even harder on the mobile versions. Good luck to them if they can find customers who are happy to pay for them even if it will become harder to convince people that there is any kind of innovation going on.
The other thing is, if you are reticent about going to Windows 10, then you are probably reticent about going to newer versions of Office as well.
Mix that in with no more hardware support from Intel for Windows 7 on the last couple of generations of chips, it will be increasingly hard to get new hardware that will run Windows 7.
Also, as some point there has to be a cut-off or new operating system features can't be taken advantage of. Ms get criticized because their own software doesn't take advantage of new OS features, then, when they finally start to make moves to take advantage of new OS features, they are criticized for abandoning older platforms... They are damned if the do and damned if they don't.
Maybe if Microsoft put in a "stop fucking spying on me, you lousy git" button, people would be more inclined to adopt it. At least with Windows 7 I can murder the bloody call home with a hosts file. In Windows 10, they hard coded the bastard in so that even this doesn't work.
Fuck Microsoft. Fuck them with Lennart Pottering.
As opposed to open source, where you follow the instructions to bend over, but suddenly find that the rest of the documentation is missing or wrong...
Yes, I'm cynical after a week of trying to install 5 different open source services, none of which are properly documented and none of which worked, even after hours of scouring the web for solutions... In fact 2 of them didn't work, because key libraries were depricated 2 years ago, but nobody bothered to update the documentation to say this or discuss how you can work around the problems.
Finally found one product that does "just work", Zimbra. So, from 6 products to evaluate, we managed to find 1 that works... Makes the evaluation report easy. :-D
A handful of us - Penguinheads, Open/LibreOffice users, G-Suite fans, etc. - have been more-or-less saying this since, well, virtually forever. And we're right. Unfortunately, truckloads of people who are sold and use MSEverything make our pleas all but unheard. Might as well try to sell Trump on climate change being real and that we can slow it down.
While we can damn (not dam) the mainstream for its following the path of least resistance and taking the road more traveled, in the end, we just feel superior to them and they are oblivious to it.
Once upon a time, I was wailing along with the NO HTML! email crowd - HUGE FILES! SECURITY RISK! - but when myself and about six other people were still clinging to plain text, I finally caved and allowed my own self all those nice text styles and formatting.
Not every battle goes the way we want it to.
" their time is up if they want access to Microsoft’s productivity innovations."
Funny how my Office 2010 on Win 7 does everything I need it to do. I've written six novels, several dozen corporate documents and no one has ever thrown them back in my face laughing hysterically.
MS is a corporation and needs to make more money this year than last year or people get fired. Enter shorter support cycles. At least they support Office longer then Apple does the iPhone, but one day they will be the same. There's money to be made.
On 32 bit on a tablet with keyboard dock/hinge cover. Also a desktop PC. So I can shudder when Linux or Win7 really annoys me.
Seriously poor compared with XP and Win7 and Linux Mint with Mate. I've also found that since 2003 the versions of MS Office have got worse. It's worth figuring out how to do styles properly in LibreOffice Writer and graphs in LibreOffice Calc. Also disable Java and change all the defaults. Like you ought to do on any package (in MS Office I disable Macros and VBA, both evil).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
