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> Its job is to open, view, edit, and save local files That might have been the case 20 years ago (and even then Office had functionality to self-update). Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents. Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now—VS Code can download and update itself and any extensions, connect to remote SSH hosts and GitHub Codespaces, use extensions that themselves connect to the Internet (like Copilot), etc. People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs (consider Rufus, an ISO burning program which can update itself, download ISOs to burn to USB drives, etc), and it’s counterproductive to just blanket-ban everything from accessing the Internet, as things are likely to stop working as expected. |
How many people do actually use these features in these programs? I myself have always seen them as nothing but bloat, a symptom of the IT industry utterly lacking a notion of a project being finished and not needing any further work. Maybe these features should come as plugins that you can optionally install. At least that's how I'd do it.
Usually, when someone wants to collaboratively edit a document or a spreadsheet, they use Google Docs. It being web-first also helps.
> Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now
And as an Android developer, I despise how Android Studio, or the Gradle Android plugin, or both of them, can just shamelessly download 100-something megabytes of some crap without asking, expecting that you have a network connection capable of that, sometimes not even showing the fact that they're accessing the network in the UI, and refusing to operate if that download fails. Eclipse didn't do that. Though it was terrible in many other ways.
> People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs
Honestly, I expect smallest programs to be complete and not need any updating.