Why is the Microsoft business plan so terrible?
I'm not working at the moment, just travelling but I'd like to talk about something that is very dear to me and that always makes me mad.
About a year and a half ago we employed a young software engineer. He came and decided we should better organise our workflow because sending by email documents to be revised by various people is not good. After working on a collaborative platform for a while, I must admit I agree with him.
He decided we should use office365 as such a platform. That was pretty much his only decision in the business, he kept on working on a small project for a couple months and then left the job one day to the other; leaving me with a pile of intellegibile code that I had to wade through for two weeks to make sense of it.
Now we are stuck with this Microsoft thing, almost 900€ a year for 5 accounts, which doesn't even cover our full team.
The thing is a steaming pile of shit.
I run Linux, and the software is not compatible on Linux; even though I'm pretty sure at some point you could install the office suite on Linux.
As such, I use the online version. I use OneDrive, SharePoint, teams, word and PowerPoint.
Teams is barely usable; with Firefox it does not open 9 times out of 10 and with chromium it takes, no joke, 10 minutes to load a call.
OneDrive and SharePoint are utterly unusable; first of all I did not understand why they have two services, one for private archives and the other for shared ones. Moreover, they are extremely slow to load taking often up to 5 minutes just for the webpage to load. In SharePoint I have to go through an useless sequence of 7-8 clicks just to get to the shared folders.
Word and PowerPoint are terrible, in no way on par with their desktop counterpart. They are extremely slow and often show outdated information. To the point that I need to keep two tabs open with the same document just to check whether there are discrepancies.
A little while ago I heard that outlook got an update which made it lose most of its functionality. I use thunderbird and am as such unaffected, but it shows the overall worsening of Microsoft software.
What the fuck happened? I never liked Microsoft too much, but I always recognised word and PowerPoint as much better software than alternatives. I now find myself much more confident in working with LibreOffice when I have to redact some official documents.
By the way, if you have some advice on another collaborative platform with similar pricing and that actually works, I'd be very happy to switch over.
