[josephg]

The problem with that metaphor is it implies 100% of microsoft's profits only exist because of theft. Their software added legitimate value to people's lives. It still does - Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do. DirectX pushed the stagnant OpenGL to innovate. Visual studio is fantastic (miles better than current XCode). C# is a worthy successor to Java. VS Code is excellent too. And so is the XBox. And I'm glad windows exists as a counterpoint to the hardware lock-in in the macos ecosystem, and to keep Apple honest.

Microsoft's customers weren't all robbed of their money. And on the other side, Bill Gates has committed to giving away all his money before he dies.

Its like, a man steals one pizza from his neighbor and makes 10 more. He eats one then he gives the rest to the homeless. Should we call him a hero? No - that theft wasn't ok! Is he a villain? No - he made pizzas and gave them away. Villains don't do that.

What is he? He's a man. He exists somewhere in the ethically murky middle. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil passes through every human heart." History will remember him for a lot of things - some good, some bad. Saint and sinner both. Like the rest of us.

[toast0]

> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do.

Yep, corporate GMail had made me detest email, but corporate Outlook made me stop using it.

Also, Outlook for Mac was the only app that I had to actually quit before sleeping a macbook or the battery would die in my bag. Nothing else could compare.

On the server side, nothing mutilates mail quite like Exchange, although recent versions aren't as good as that as the old ones were.

Word and Excel are kind of nice, but I don't use them enough to pay for them, so OpenOffice it is.

[josephg]

Thats nice for you. Personally I use Apple Pages to compose word documents.

But this isn't about us. The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers. From your nephew with an xbox, to devs in the C# ecosystem, to office workers who use word and excel to get their work done the answer is obviously yes.

[toast0]

> The question is whether Microsoft's products add real value to their customers.

I'm pretty sure Outlook convincing me not to read corporate mail was not of value to my employer (Microsoft's customer). At the very least, it added confusion and delay when other employees expected me to see things they emailed. Perhaps letting me focus on other stuff was of benefit to the employer, but that's tricky to measure; it's hard to imagine employers want to use a terrible email system to subtly discourage email use, there are more effective ways.

[dragonwriter]

> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do.

“What they do” as in “Suck in money based on path-dependence of familiarity, lock-in, and network effects”?

[ConceptJunkie]

> Outlook & the office suite are still world class at what they do

OK, now I know you're kidding.

[josephg]

My next door neighbour is a lawyer. I asked about her workflow when visiting during the lockdown.

There's about 40 lawyers in her office, and they have a lot of ongoing cases between all their clients. She spends some of her time each week "filing". For her this means sifting through the firehose of emails and documents that their office receives and assigning every one to the correct case, marking if it needs attention (and from whom), tagging the types of documents, etc etc.

She does all this from home through a custom workflow built on top of Outlook. I'm sure its not pretty in the backend, but can you name a system that would let her do her job more effectively? MacOS Mail? Gmail? Hah! No. Outlook is the tool they use; and it looks like it works well - even working from home.

I don't use anything in the office suite myself, but for my neighbour's office I don't think there's a better choice. Hate on outlook if you want, it solves problems for real users.

[perl4ever]

Lotus Notes fan?