Not familiar with azure, so I’m speaking from ignorance there.
Is there really anything that requires MS Office? For simple people like me Libre Office has everything covered.
Windows is only required by PC gamers. For everything there are better solutions.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people for whom that is the reality. I’m not one of them, but I still use a windows laptop at work for things like office and email because that’s (bad) company policy. Literally the only thing I ever do where I would not be better served by a linux laptop is making powerpoint presentations, and I don’t really use any of the fancy features anyway, so I could totally use libreoffice or google docs instead.
Microsoft Access is required @my jrob and chains me to MS. As far as I know there are no open alternatives. If there are please correct me.
BTW Azure/vuze is a Bittorrent client
So nothing requiring the continual use of MS products except inertia?
So using MS is purely choice now (often head office choice, but choice nonetheless)?
It is Newton’s first Law.
But no, there’s no compatible alternative to Access.
I didn’t realize, thanks!
Is it a completely walled garden, or can data be exported into an open system?
Microsoft Abscess.
What else to say…
do not image search this
It does, but turns into a hot mess of garbage
I thought “usefully exported” was implied.
Sounds like some classic Microsoft there!
Yes. Unfortunately, the head office doesn’t get to see how many highly-paid hours all of us peons spend dealing with the fact that Windows is a horribly sub-par operating system, in terms of usability and stability.
Office isn’t required - you could at this point make do with Google Docs even, or at least OpenOffice and I know that many people do. I don’t think either of those have the polish that MS Office does but you could certainly get by.
I suppose my point was that very few companies make anything that anyone needs in the sense that they are monopolies. Certainly none of the big ones like Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple. They all make general use products that generally have competitors, which is a good thing for consumers. All of those companies could mostly disappear and someone could step up to the plate, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not relevant to the industry or modern life, so calling it useless or offensive is pretty weird, especially given that there are plenty of tech companies that are in that actual place of growing old and outdated. It would be as weird as saying “Ford? Psh. Nobody drives those.” or “It’s so cute that Xerox thinks it’s relevant to the printing world.”
Edit: or simply that any of the competitors you could point out would be in the same place as having viable alternatives to them.
Isn’t Access just a lightweight db with a UI? Couldn’t it be replaced pretty easily with a webapp and a half decent database?
I was thinking about Microsoft’s revenues.
There are free alternatives for almost everything they get paid for.
If I were an MS exec, I’d be worked about that one. Inertia can be overcome, and who would choose Microsoft if setting up a new system?
Only because they were once an utterly unavoidable cost of doing business.
I think that MS’s revenue stream makes it pretty clear that ‘there are alternatives, but many people prefer our product’ is a perfectly reasonable place to be at for a company, and is basically where most companies reside.
You can’t avoid the concept of open source software/etc. What could a company like MS make that couldn’t just be re-imagined or recreated as an open source alternative? Ultimately it’s services, which is what Satya has been focusing on - you can’t just have a free version of Azure, for example, or the email hosting offered with some of the Office commercial products.
I also think it’s kind of weird you think that there are people who don’t prefer windows just on it’s own merits. I certainly do, even having used many linux products over the years. (I’ll admit to not being familiar with OSX’s current standing) - part of that is that I’m a gamer, but part of it is also just familiarity and features - Linux and OSX don’t offer anything compelling enough to me to go through the trouble of relearning new systems and repurchasing software or hardware to work with their stuff. The time cost alone is significant there, not to mention money. Would I do the same if I was starting from literal square 1, no computer knowledge? Honestly not sure. That’s an interesting scenario - but it’s not one that the majority of users experience.
I’ve become a bit hostile to Microsoft in recent years. I don’t like their upgrade path from Windows 7.
There’s no reason to expect others to agree. Thanks for checking me!
I sympathize as well in many regards. A lot of the decisions MS has made don’t always sit well with me, but then again so does the decisions of many groups, including many OSS groups. Thanks for having a reasonable conversation about something you feel strongly about. 
No, not exactly. The reason Access prevails is related to the reason a lot of companies are still running a Lotus server somewhere out of a closet.
Access is “popular” because it makes it possible for non-IT folks to roll their own usable (*shudder*) solution without interference, “help,” or “waiting for those IT folks to build it.” This has its own problems (for example, having to citrix Access 97 because some database that’s still in use doesn’t cleanly convert over to some recent version) but as much as I hate both Access and Lotus, I recognize the reasons they stay around.
To set up a free replacement, you’d not only have to work perfectly with some of the most obscure functions of every version of Access starting with 97 and moving forward, but you’d also have to make it at least as easy to build new stuff in it. Stuff that you might consider extremely ill-conceived.
That or you’d have to convince 3-5 departments per implementation that it was worth their time to pay for someone to convert the old databases over to something new. Which, if any of them were likely to, would probably already have been converted over to a managed database implementation.
