[ManFromUranus]

> mostly because the microsoft product were so unpolished that were terrible to use

Unpolished compared to what? Open office? Apples offerings? Surely you are joking. MS Office is probably the most polished and feature rich office suite out there. For me nothing else compares, the only factor that was off-putting about using office was the cost. The cost deterrent has largely gone away, so for me there's almost no reason to use anything else, other than to investigate future alternatives.

[JimmaDaRustla]

Ya, I don't know what he is talking about either...Office has always had complete and fully functional features in every release - you never got a product which didn't have features of it's predecessor (maybe aside clipart/wordart or gimmicky stuff like that), nor partially implemented features.

[viraptor]

Office 95/97 was a time when you had to open the file in the same version it was saved in or the formatting and any embedded objects could change. This happened both ways - not just a backwards compatibility issue.

[andrea_sdl]

Personally I always found the OS less polished than OS X, this difference has been reduced by the work done on windows 10.

Aside from this thing office has always been the de facto, but it wasn't until office 2007 (ribbons? I don't recall if it was 2007 or 2003) that the office suite was revamped from an UI point of view. That really was the moment microsoft made a difference that wasn't matched (and still isn't). Before the 2007, even though the open office suite was inferior because of the compatibility issues, the interfaces weren't so superior (IMHO).

The ribbon bar (loved or hated) was the first step towards the recent UI improvements. The same OneNote has vastly improved.

Also, I am specifically not talking about feature-richness. It's obvious that there are not so many competitors to office in this regard, but still with many features comes complexity, and complexity comes at a price. Microsoft found a great way to reduce that complexity without sacrificing features. (a totally different way compared to apple, which _usually_ start with less features and adds them over time).

[WorldWideWayne]

I always thought OS X was really clunky compared to Windows where everything is fairly uniform and well labeled. Also, in OS X you can't have simple features like "changing the color of the mouse cursor" in OS X because Apple.

Look at any thread about OS X desktop setups and you'll see people recommending tools that add features from Windows like changing the way Alt-Tab works or adding tiling commands.

However there are many features that you simply can't have (besides the cursor color that I mentioned above.) You can't have a proper taskbar even though many people want one because Apple doesn't let you use a certain API that the Dock uses to change `NSScreen.visibleFrame`.

In Windows there is a simple uniform way of controlling the entire OS with the keyboard whereas in OS X, you have to remember a million secret handshakes. Windows also has a vastly more robust file browser compared to the ailing Finder that everybody hates. It's no wonder that there is hardly any software for extending Finder in OS X like TortoiseGit. Most people just recommend to replace it with a better app like XtraFinder, TotalFinder or PathFinder.

The only reason anyone uses it around here is because it's got Unix and it's not from Microsoft. If it wasn't Unix, most people would be making fun of the klunky interface just like they made fun of the Mac interface back in the 90's.

[viraptor]

Things can work badly in absolute scale, not just compared to other products. Office 95 was full of bugs, pain to use, and almost designed for future compatibility issues. It ate you data when you weren't looking.