The breaking point for me was when I was showered with Copilot+ pop-ups on every single hover. Let me fucking copy/cut/paste/format in peace. I never asked for any of this, and neither did any user of any level of expertise.
Switched to OnlyOffice as it felt to perfectly answer my needs. There are still some quirks with non-UTF-8 documents, but you know what, I’d rather iron those issues out than be shoved a product I didn’t request nor need at every single interaction I have.
I highly encourage anyone that hasn’t done already to explore alternatives to the M*crosoft Suite, if they haven’t done it by now. Every update is just the worst form of enshittification known to humankind. Can’t wait to have an intrusive slop AI agent tell me how to do my Maths in the Calculator app next.
Let apps be just apps again 🗣️🗣️📢
Some executive noticed that they can’t sell you larger cloud storage if you haven’t used it up.
Then someone on the office copilot team said they wished they had access to more comprehensive data about what people write with office apps and the rest is history.
Jesus christ. So glad I ditched MS. It’s like getting out of a cult - once you see it looking in from the outside, you finally realize how terrible it is.
This made my blood boil, and then I remembered I switched to Linux a month ago… all good.
I would love to switch to LibreOffice (or similar) but I haven’t been able to find a way to get tables to work in the same way they do in Excel, and that’s a deal breaker for me. None of the suggested approaches come close to being able to select a range, press ctrl+t and immediately be able to filter/sort/lookup using column names from anywhere in the document. I use that feature dozens of times a day, and so does everyone in my circles that deals with financial data.
Why I use libreoffice.
Holy fucking shit, what absolute trash
See ya Ms Products! I hope you all like that cloud of yours!
If you mind that Word documents are stored in the cloud by default, you need to modify the default setting
…or just use some other app for your private documents and Word only for work-related stuff or such. I use Word/Office at work and have absolutely no issue with all the documentation being saved in the cloud. But for private stuff I would have to think twice if I want this.
At this point that’s almost like ransomware.
This might be when I finally jump ship and go to Linux. I should do Mint, right?
You have to click through to a third save dialogue just to choose “Browse my files…”.
this operating system still costs like $100
/ per year
Who the fuck pays full price for windows? Just buy an oem license for like $15.
Try 150$ :(
Operating system sold separately. Some assembly required.
Not to be used to train AI. We promise.
LLM’s out here running wild. How Rude.Maybe I should switch to Linux again.
They’d break SO MANY international and data security laws if they tried breaking into people’s OneDrive, it’d be hilarious to see the number of lawsuits they’d lose by default.
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS. besides, you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
they’re probably already doing that to a smaller degree, and slightly protecting themselves with an obscure clause in their TOS
As soon as you find proof, you have literally free money up for the taking at any court.
you only lose lawsuits if you get caught - and churning things through AI is a great way to erase any fingerprints that identifies stolen data
That’s… not how any of this works…
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done, it could also be an “and” where you expected “or”, or an ommision of a specific thing… my point being - it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
it very much is how it works though? show me a lawsuit someone lost before they got caught commiting a crime. and how would you even go about proving that your unpublished documents were used to train AI? even an entire life’s work of one person is just a speck in the training data, it’s impossible to definitively prove your work was stolen and used to train an AI. besides there will always be plausible deniability that the AI just made shit up that happened to look kinda like what you once wrote
an obscure clause in TOS won’t be a small print of an evil villain speech exposing their plot in clear wording. what it would be is something worded vaguely enough to make things seem like the end user technically agreed to what was being done
That means nothing. Illegal terms can’t be enforced in contracts or terms of service.
it’s always going to be a technicality that in case of a lawsuit would be a valid defence in the eyes of law
No. Written law always takes precedence. If they spied on your data stored in OneDrive, they’d lose by default the moment the case hit the courthouse.
As for your second paragraph: yeah, I agree. If they did that, the damage would’ve already been done. But it would kill the business once found out. The benefit is not worth the risk.
For example: you’re saying that they would use it to train AI, right?
They don’t train AI. They get a trained model from OpenAI.