Microsoft products you can start saying no to: Windows, WSL, GitHub, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, Codespaces, Azure, npm, Teams, Outlook, Office, & LinkedIn.
Many of these I agree with. Then you get into things like github and LinkedIn. Dropping GitHub means not contributing to a huge swath of open source projects. Dropping LinkedIn is a great way to get your job application passed over (it’s literally required for some companies…. For some dumb reason.)
Use them reluctantly & push back against it until you can free yourself from them. Let folks know you are unhappy about it or powers at be will think everything is okay. Surely we can agree fundamentally that Microsoft should not be controlling these spaces as it does with the platform lock-in.
Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.
That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.
Lots of problems that used to exist in this area no longer do.
Used to be that the de facto standard office format was doc/xls/ppt, now both MS Office and LibreOffice support both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.
Used to be that internal software was mostly written for the Windows API, now it is mostly written for web browsers (between which there are no longer any significant differences in terms of standards compatibility).
The world really is slowly getting better. I would like to help accelerate this, but don’t really have any ideas where to start.
now it is mostly written for web browsers (between which there are no longer any significant differences in terms of standards compatibility).
At this point I think it is just a matter of time until Google (most likely due to their near monopoly with Chrome), will push for some new standard that they own and control and must be used everywhere. For some handwaving combination of security and protect the kids, etc. And google are in a great position to make it happen, don’t support it? Oh noes, your site is no longer listed in google searches.
And that will be the end of the open web, you can only use one browser that totally controls what you can and cannot do. Ad blocking is just the start, saving websites or images? Nah. We don’t allow that. Copy the url? No, you need to use this share button that has embedded tracking links in it, etc.
Chrome has 65% market share (according to Statcounter), far from a near monopoly. Even if you add Edge (which you shouldn’t because Microsoft could fork Blink at any time), you only get 70% for their web engine. Around 2003 or 2004, IE had like 95% market share (and many websites required Flash Player) and we now know that that was eventually defeated.
I am all for worrying about the decline of good things, but your scenario isn’t something I’m worrying that much about.
I don’t know where you are getting those numbers from. Most put chrome in around 78%, edge at 10% and then everything else. And all chrome re-skins are just that, google still controls it. There is a reason one of the biggest software companies in the world just gave up their own browser engine and runs a competitor’s with some face paint.
Google are in a far better position to push something like this through than Microsoft ever where, due to their near monopoly on searches. Any site not using it would be more or less dead. Just going from number 1 to 2 on a google search can mean a huge drop in traffic, and then imagine not even being on it at all.
now both MS Office and LibreOffice support both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.
There are standards and then there are “standards.” ODF was designed to be usable and implementable from the spec. Meanwhile, OOXML is just a glorified XML serialization of Word’s internal memory structures that Microsoft bribed ECMA to rubber-stamp.
Of course they are not equally good, no question about it. They are still both (technically) open standards and the main point is that they are both supported by both pieces of software, i.e. the practical difference between them is mainly in the UI, you don’t need to get the other one just to read files created by one of them.
Ever tried using Microsoft online crap in a non windows browser?
Hell, Outlook doesn’t work reliably anymore on chrome for crap sake, and I know this because at my work we’re stuck with that crap. I use Firefox for Outlook, and Chrome for teams because teams doesn’t work on firefox because of course and because fuck you we’re Microsoft and how dare you not use edge on windows?
I’d love to switch us over but that is a project years away.
both ODF and OOXML both of which are open standards.
ODF is an open standard, OOXML is designed to pretend it is one, only one just can’t make a compliant implementation and MS doesn’t follow what they’ve published anyway.
Hex dumps are kinda human readable too. You see human readable values of every byte.
The sheer size of OOXML prevents it from being normally implemented by most people, and then there is the issue of what’s made by actual MS Word not following it.
Just saw in another post that Microsoft is pushing their copilot AI into Windows 2022 servers. Windows 11 will become a data syphoning ad-riddled spyware. And Microsoft office will send everything you type to some AI learning machine god knows where.
This will be a huge privacy concern for governments very soon and may force them to switch to Linux and libre office. Germany is not even the first one to do this. French police already use Ubuntu on their desktop computers.
I work with government admins a lot and they’ve already told me the shit show they’ve been dealing with regarding feature updates somehow installing themselves on their devices despite it being disabled via GPO. Unfortunately, I think the government will just flex on Microsoft and force them to strip the shit out for their baseline Windows images rather than move to a Linux alternative.
My windows PC bricked its OS in the last month, it was definately caused by an upgrade (corrupted hive). I strip my windows installs bare with a script so I assume it was looking for some telemetry service or something. Jokes on Windows, I was planning to switch the OS on that PC anyway. Annoying because it was bad timing.
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