That you used MS Office to make it? I wouldn’t know or care. (There’s probably ways to look at the PDF metadata and find its originating software, but that’s besides the point.)
(Edit: I meant when I am myself interviewing for a job at a company, not when I’m interviewing a potential applicant — sorry for the confusion.)
It’s more that some companies will send you a Teams invite to an interview, or use Outlook-specific, nonstandard email features, or try (and usually fail) to share a document with you from their internal Sharepoint, etc. It’s not the individual usage of Microsoft Office that’s annoying, it’s Microsoft’s online services meant to compete with Google Workspace/Slack/etc.. A lot of their online suite is an inferior copy of a superior service by another company, except Microsoft makes a shittier version of it and bundles it into your enterprise subscription, so then the whole company is forced to use it. They sell their suite to execs who care more about pricing than quality, and the users suffer. (Strictly IMHO.)
I use a very old version of MS Word that was originally saved on a CD. It’s now saved on my hard drive along with the necessary key to install. Still works fine, no compatibility issues. Which further reinforces my resolve that many so-called software “improvements” are actually useless.
Planning to continue this way as long as I can keep it running. F**k the subscription model in the neck.
I work in industrial automation. My company is standardized on Microsoft, and all of our customers seem to have standardized on it as well. Meetings with customers are done using Teams, e-mails go through Outlook, etc. Internal documents are usually either .docx or .xls (managers seem to love Excel).
To be fair, most industrial companies do have an “old fashioned” company culture. The emphasis is on safety and being able to run equipment 24/7/365 for several decades before replacing anything. These also tend to be older, larger, and more bureaucratic businesses.
My company is a small fintech offering proprietary SaaS platforms. Our clients are enormous global financial institutions. They would laugh us out of the room if we even hinted at the suggestion that they use anything but Microsoft solutions.
I’m just getting to that part. But it’s broadly anti-trust, tech unions, interoperability and a fourth thing I can’t remember. He spends part of the book explaining how these forces used to work to pressure companies to have good products and treat their customers well. One thing he mentions is that anti-trust policies in other countries have knock-on effects in the US (one example is that Apple was forced to switch from proprietary lightning ports to universal USB C ports for all of their products because of a UK law), so success isn’t even necessarily dependent on US priorities, and globally there is currently a very strong anti-monopoly push. He’s a very strong believer in the power of the people to demand change. He’s been working in the digital rights space for 25 years, so I find his approach realistic and believable. Good read.
It seems like those ideas have all been tried and soundly defeated, at least in the US. Anti-trust failed to rein in Apple or Google’s monopolies, despite Epic’s best efforts. Tech unions are a thing now, but failed to stop the Microactiblizzard layoffs, or Rockstar’s. Interoperability is on the decline with walled gardens stronger than ever, and sideloading going away.
I mean, all great ideas, but it seems like ultimately they all depend on having a strong enough government and populace that gives a damn. Those tactics might work in the E.U. but they seem to have had limited to no effect here in the US, where most enshittification originates…
What do you do when the society and economy is completely captured by the FAANGs and there’s no regulator strong enough to give them anything more than the occasional wrist slap?
I use MS Office because I have an extensive set of Access databases that I use regularly. Excel is OK for less extensive spreadsheet use, and for word processing I still use an old version of WordPerfect, which has much better functionality for the things I mostly do. My wife has written entire books in it.
Hmmm… I know someone who does a lot of consulting work for (mostly) large companies across different industries including a global technology company specializing in automation, medical tech companies, food services, even an airline, and every one of them uses MS Office. Perhaps not as rare as you think. The most frequently exchanged documents are Word files and Excel spreadsheets.
On the general subject of enshittification, I think we’re plagued by two different factors. Software for phones and tablets has somehow established the norm that the user has very little control over things like updates and rollbacks. It’s practically a turnkey environment controlled by the OS and app vendors. On PCs, Microsoft’s enshittification is of course legendary.
To add to the above, based on my observations as noted in the previous post, Windows with MS Office seems to be the same kind of de facto standard that IBM was in the past century, and for similar reasons. When a large company needed a central mainframe computer, IBM was almost inevitably who they turned to, even though there were often numerous better options. IBM was typically more expensive, less advanced, and offered lower performance than competitors, but as the saying went, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. The fact that there are technically better options than MS Office is essentially irrelevant to most companies.
Doctorow talks about that a bit in his book. He suggests that one reason the federal government became synonymous with incompetence was because the federal government was locked into IBM products and services.