My interpretation is that you can look at the code but vibe coding means ultimately you're not writing the code, you're just prompting. It would make sense to prompt "I'd like variable name 'bar' to be 'foo' instead." and that would still be vibe coding.
This seems like an issue but in all my practical experience it really isn't. TypeScript becomes JavaScript with the types removed. Then you tree-shake, minify, and whatever is executed is no where near what you actually wrote but at the same it totally is the same because that's no different than any other compilation process.
Occasionally, I have to remember that JavaScript has no types at runtime but it's surprisingly not that often.
I mean what makes it more acceptable is that you have HMR and instant preview during development. So, all the transformations and bundling aside, you do see how it runs during development.
However I have been in a few situations at work where all of a sudden we did have issues that required us to dig deeper. There were also some bundling related issues that caused problems in production deployments. At that point many co workers had no idea how to even approach it to be honest.
I've had similar experiences with compiled languages in one form or another throughout my career as well. I don't think JavaScript is particularly special that we need to call it out for things like TypeScript, minification, or bundling.
Programmers are the last people on earth who should complain about job loss due to automation. Our entire jobs since the beginning has been automating people out of jobs and we've done a wonderful job of that for decades. Entire classes of jobs no longer exist. Although I'm not personally responsible for anyone losing their job I'm certainly responsible for less people being hired.
AI is just the next step and not even a particularly large leap. We already needed less law secretaries due to advances of technology. We killed most journalism two decades ago. Art and Music had Photoshop and autotune. Now we've actually achieved something we've literally been striving for since the dawn of computing -- the ability to speak natural language to a computer and have it do what we ask. But it's just one more step.
I don't think this type of argument is sound at all. There are plenty of programmers whose work doesn't contribute to automating away others' jobs, or those who might not see it in such a way. You are free to disagree with the opinions expressed by the poster above, but making such a sweeping generalization about how we shouldn't hold a supposedly hypocritical opinion based on some kind of imagined consensus seems like an excuse to promote your views over others' as the 'correct' ones.
I’m not saying individual programmers consciously set out to eliminate jobs, or that every programmer's work directly replaces someone. But the historical and structural reality of the profession is that software development, as a field, has consistently produced automation that reduces the amount of human labor required.
That pattern is bigger than any one of us and it's not a moral judgment. It's simply part of what technology does and has always done. AI is a continuation of that same trend we've all participated in, whether directly or indirectly. My point is that to stop now and say "look at all these jobs being eliminated by computers" is several decades too late.
I understand the sentiment, yet I can still complain ;-)
I do think there is a qualitative difference in AI as compared to previous automation changes. This qualitative difference and its potential impacts beyond the obvious (job losses) is what is more worrying. The societal impact of AI slop, the impact on human intellectual efforts, pursuits, value and meaning are very concerning.
As I'm getting better and better results with it, I'm having it do more and more things. I went through a complete agentic refactor of a project from Angular 17 to Angular 20 (RxJS to Signals) and I'd say it did it perfectly. A few times I'd get it summarize and start a new chat because it can start to get less effective when the history gets too long. I also had to iterate on what I wanted and do things a step a time. Although it was very clear that it also wanted to do things in pieces and test each major change before continuing on.
I think like any tool it's has it's pros and cons and the more you use it the more you figure out how to make the best use out of it and when to give up.
I'm not sure what you're using. I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++. The original code was so intertwined that I didn't want to figure out so I had shelved the project until AI came along.
It wasn't super bad at converting the code but even it struggled with some of the logic. Luckily, I had it design a test suite to compare the outputs of the old application and the new one. When it couldn't figure out why it was getting different results, it would start generating hex dumps comparisons, writing small python programs, and analyzing the results to figure out where it had gone wrong. It slowly iterated on each difference until it had resolved them. Building the code, running the test suite, comparing the results, changing the code, repeat. Some of the issues are likely bugs in the original code (that it fixed) but since I was going for byte-for-byte perfection it had to re-introduce them.
The issues you describe I have seen but not with the right technology and not in a while.
At the high level, you asked LLM to translate N lines of code to maybe 2N lines of code, while GP asked LLM to translate N lines of English to possibly 10N lines of code. Very different scenarios.
The OP said the LLM didn't build anything, said it was great, and didn't even compile it. My experience has been far the opposite: not only compiling it and fixing compile time errors but also running it and fixing runtime issues as well. Even going so far as to write waveform analysis tools in Python (the output of this project was WAV files) to determine the issues.
It doesn't really matter what we told it do; a task is a task. But clearly how each LLM performed that task very different for me than the OP.
I'll be the first to say I've abandoned a chat and started a new one to get the result I want. I don't see that as a net negative though -- that's just how you use it.
Are you sure claude didn't do exactly the same thing but the harness, claude code, just hid it from you?
I have seen AI agents fall into the exact loop that GP discussed and needed manual intervention to fall out of.
Also blindly having the AI migrate code from "spaghetti C" to "structured C++" sounds more like a recipe for "spaghetti C" to "fettuccine C++".
Sometimes its hidden data structures and algorithms you want to formalize when doing a large scale refactor and I have found that AIs are definitely able to identify that but it's definitely not their default behaviour and they fall out of that behaviour pretty quickly if not constantly reminded to do so.
> Are you sure claude didn't do exactly the same thing but the harness, claude code, just hid it from you?
What do you mean? Are you under the impression I'm not even reading the code? The code is actually the most important part because I already have working software but what I want is working software that I can understand and work with better (and so far, the results have been good).
Reading the code and actually understanding the code is not that the same thing.
"This looks good", vs "Oh that is what this complex algorithm was" is a big difference.
Effectively, to review that the code is not just being rewritten into the same code but with C++ syntax and conventions means you need to understand the original C code, meaning the hard part was not the code generation (via LLM or fingers) but the understanding and I'm unsure the AI can do the high level understanding since I have never gotten it to produce said understanding without explicitly telling it.
Effectively, "x.c, y.c, z.c implements a DSL but is convoluted and not well structured, generate the same DSL in C++" works great. "Rewrite x.c, y.c, z.c into C++ buildings abstractions to make it more ergonomic" generally won't recognise the DSL and formalise it in a way that is very easy to do in C++, it will just make it "C++" but the same convoluted structure exists.
> Reading the code and actually understanding the code is not that the same thing.
Ok. Let me be more specific then. I'm "understanding" the code since that's the point.
> I'm unsure the AI can do the high level understanding since I have never gotten it to produce said understanding without explicitly telling it.
My experience has been the opposite: it often starts by producing a usable high-level description of what the code is doing (sometimes imperfectly) and then proposes refactors that match common patterns -- especially if you give it enough context and let it iterate.
> "Rewrite x.c, y.c, z.c into C++ buildings abstractions to make it more ergonomic" generally won't recognise the DSL and formalise it in a way that is very easy to do in C++, it will just make it "C++" but the same convoluted structure exists.
That can happen if you ask for a mechanical translation or if the prompt doesn't encourage redesign. My point was literally make it well-designed idiomatic C++ and it did that. Inside of the LLM training is a whole bunch of C++ code and it seems to be leaning on that.
I did direct some goals (e.g., separating device-specific code and configuration into separate classes so adding a device means adding a class instead of sprinkling if statements everywhere). But it also made independent structural improvements: it split out data generation vs file generation into pipeline/stream-like components and did strict separation of dependencies. It's actually well designed for unit testing and mocking even though I didn't tell it I wanted that.
I'm not claiming it has human-level understanding or that it never makes mistakes -- but "it can't do high-level understanding" doesn't match what I'm seeing in practice. At minimum, it can infer the shape of the application well enough to propose and implement a much more ergonomic architecture, especially with iterative guidance.
I had to have it introduce some "bugs" for byte-for-byte matching because it had generalized some of the file generation and the original C code generated slightly different file structures for different devices. There's no reason for this difference; it's just different code trying to do the same thing. I'll probably remove these differences when the whole thing is done.
> I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++
You migrated code from one of the simplest programming languages to unarguably the most complex programm language in existence. I feel for you; I really do.
How did you ensure that it didn't introduce any of the myriad of footguns that C++ has that aren't present in C?
I mean, we're talking about a language here that has an entire book just for variable initialisation - choose the wrong one for your use-case and you're boned! Just on variable initialisation, how do you know it used the correct form in all of the places?
I do a lot of C++ programming and that's really over selling the issues. You don't have to read an entire book of variable initialization to do it correctly. And using STL types are a lot safer than passing pointers around.
It's actually far easier to me to tell that it's not leaking memory or accessing some unallocated data in the C++ version than the C version.
A simple language just pushes complexity from the language into the code. Being able to represent things in a more high-level way is entirely the point of this exercise because the C version didn't have the tools to express it more cleanly.
Some of my favorite open source software is random stuff that the author just completely abandoned but had the forethought to make open source so that others could still use it, fix bugs, add features, and even fork it.
RMS just wanted to be able to fix his printer driver.
> DHH's choice of license reacts to a real pressure in open source: many companies make real money from open source software while leaving the hard work of building and maintaining it to others.
If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software.
That being said; I have no issue with a developer choosing any license they want -- it's their software and therefore it's their right. But calling it "open source" when it specifically forbids certain use-cases is just wrong. DHH wants his cake (pretend it's real OSS) and eat it too (deny usages).
> If you don't want start a business and make real money from your software then denying that to others is antithetical to the concept of open source and free software.
What if you do and have done so, yet you're competing with e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, who can do it for cheaper than you due to scale, and also have a much easier time to sell an extra line item to their existing customers vs you having to go through commercial negotiations and purchase agreements? Cf. Elastic, Redis, etc.
If you have a problem with that then don't make it open source.
And if you don't make it open source, don't call it open source.
My own personal position is that my commercial software is commercial for me and my open source software is free for everyone to use for any purpose including making money that I will never see. If I cared, I wouldn't make that software open source.
Maybe not '98 but I'm still rocking Office 2013. It still seems fully compatible with all current office offerings and runs fine on Windows 11. I've certainly gotten my monies worth off of that license.
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.
I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.
And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
Zoho is another player in that "alternative to Micro$oft for office/corporate needs" market. Its products are nice and affordable, and especially suitable for SOHO customers.
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
>Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
It would be a huge undertaking. You have to use tens of different software packages who weren't designed to work with each other, unlike MS offering. Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
> Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?
Maybe, if you can rally public resources behind you. Probably not given the value you can command in the private sector.
That’s the point. These people are expensive. Because they’re rare. There is a talent deficit at the top of tech, and if I had to describe it broadly, it’s in folks who can (a) write a letter to an elected representative that doesn’t get thrown in the nutter pile and (b) raise money.
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
> There aren’t the same thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying! Heck, I just talked to a senior dev from AWS a week ago that was a massive technical expert, but obviously couldn't code their way to an actual product on their own. Which is fine, and hence my original comment on the current rarity of those skillsets.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Ehhhhhhh hard to say really. The one-time payment versions of Office still exist, work totally fine, and have excellent add-on extension support. You could move the economics around a bit between consumers and extension developers, but that would probably be it.
If doing it from scratch, if jumping off from an already established product - could work, along with name recognition.
If there was one that i would put that could go head to head and possibly pull it off would be Corel[1], their suite is pretty comprehensive along with their collaborative suite.
Althogh from their businesss model seems they are content to maintain a narrow market and possible still remember getting burned by MS in the early days.
There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope.
Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete".
But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.
How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.
Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
And decided that it was cheaper and easier to just outsource it to Microsoft. Because doing it in today's environment - different work computers, backend servers, mobile devices, etc - is much more complicated than just managing permissions on a mainframe.
Distributed databases are a solved problem (besides maybe performance). Offloading account management to arbitrary databases too. Why everyone is using Microsoft is, because then they have someone to blame, instead of needing to point at themselves.
And setting up things like rsync to replace dropbox is also "fairly quick"!
The point isn't that but the fact that like a normal user, a normal business don't want to have to tinker with low level components to get the functionality they want. They desire to pay and get a working piece of infrastructure with low hassle (tho i get saying active directory being low hassle is weird).
But a normal user isn't going to setup AD either. This will be done by sysadmins anyway, so stuff like being able to put the configuration into version control is actually useful for them. The "normal business" has lots of employee databases anyways and integration is actually a feature instead of needing to sync it with bespoke Microsoft internals.
So you can hook up all those internal employee databases to your new created libpam-mysql and hook it up all to slack or just use what Microsoft sells you.
I do not need to create it, it already exists. Yes, you can write your own pam module, but in general you do not need to.
> just use what Microsoft sells you.
Which means now your employees need to manually sync the MS and your internal databases. Depends on how much your employees time is worth for you. I mean a lot of companies do exactly that, but it is certainly not the cheaper option.
Also using what MS sells is also illegal. Not that anyone cares, as whole Europe ignores that, but when you meet a civil servant on the wrong foot, your company is toast.
Active Directory is a very no-code tool and has a ton of documentation and certifications online, no college degree required. And it's built by paid devs with a verifiable software supply chain.
I just looked up libpam-mysql and it is not no-code at all. And it looks like an unpaid community project which allows contributions from anywhere. That's not a true replacement.
It is so simple, that the whole documentation fits in the README. All you need to do is to tell it the table and column names of your existing database and of you go. If you have something more complicated you can also put arbitrary SQL statements in there.
So my configuration is this (I only redacted the company name, the remaining is copied verbatim):
users.host = /run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
users.database = Company
users.db_user = mail
users.db_passwd = $(secret-tool lookup user mail@mysql)
users.table = User
users.user_column = username
users.password_column = password
users.password_crypt = Y
> and it is not no-code at all
Then tell me how I put your "no-code tool" into the VCS?
> no college degree required
Yeah, which nearly everyone has, but now you need to run through tons of certification programs instead. Which cost a lot of money, so you have the "Certified Rockstar Active Directory Consultant Adviser (TM)"
> it looks like an unpaid community project
> built by paid devs with a verifiable software supply chain.
Which is how most FOSS OS work, which have way more of a verifiable supply chain than your proprietary closed-source OS from Microsoft.
> it is not no-code at all. no college degree required.
Which totally matters, because you want random Joe who hasn't even finished college to be able to mess around with the company authentication setup.
As chiii already pointed out, you are looking at the wrong end of the spectrum.
Decision in Enterprise organizations are not done by the end user and non of your options, not even Google Docs, offers the equality of features.
M365 is far more than just Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams (apart from some apps depending on the M365 tier you are in like Access, Project, Visio etc.), you buy a whole workspace. Users can seamlessly share and work together on documents, not only in their organization but also with others. It's easy to process information from one app to the other etc.
Yes, Google Docs might be the closest thing when it comes to features (but no match), however, looking at local restrictions and laws, Microsoft is one of the few companies that can host you M365 solution in an environment that, for example, matches european laws.
And that is the big problem, there are no alternatives for companies that are already on M365 and using the features of it.
"Seamless" may be irrationally exuberant but it's better than the others _at scale_.
LibreOffice, etc. may see similar from the UI end but if you're scaling across multiple sites/archetypes/employee models/regulatory environments, -and- want access to a wide and deep pool of administrative labor, M365 is seamless by comparison.
HN is such a meme at this point for all the bad reasons. It's why I'd bail on this site again if other social media wasn't worse.
"Hacker News commenters are frequently unaware that their use cases and customer preferences do not reflect the average customer demand in the market."
> Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.
Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.
It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.
Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.
If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.
This was the key point I tried to make at the start of this thread: "It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues."
Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.
But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.
The office you are talking about is not what it used to be a few decades ago. I am not into this world but what I know of it is like you are comparing a tool to the whole workshop. No, the tool does not replace the workshop, the tool is a very small part of the workshop.
There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.
(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)
I can believe you not hearing about Sharepoint. But not hearing about Onedrive is basically impossible if you have used a Windows machine in the last decade.
Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.
I have never used windows machines for anything but gaming, but I get your point readily. If I had used the windows finder I would have encountered onedrive.
It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365
Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose.
Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads.
The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers.
Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do.
A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.
And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
Oracle did the same cheap dirty trick for profits, when it is bundled adware/spyware (Ask toolbar) by default on its JRE (Java Runtime Installer) used on millions of corporate and student/home PCs, because it knew Java/JRE would already be whitelisted on those machines (Java gets updates, so IT admins tend to whitelist its EXEcutable and its installer (JRE installer), since it is necessary for corporate work (many legacy software depend on Java)).
Suddenly, many IT admins were in a tough spot explaining to many internal customers (including senior management; even CxO's have Java on their office laptops) why their PCs were suddenly flooded with popup ads and even ads on intranet sites (because Ask toolbar integrated into the browser)).
Google used to have a motto/policy of "Do Not Evil", but it silently dropped that approach. It had to do so, because its biggest rivals had already adopted and profited from the evil attitudes, so it too simply followed the evil tide.
The world has always been ruled by the oligarchs (the richest and most powerful people), but in modern era, it is the biggest corporates (especially trillion dollar valuation companies) that call the shots. And they continue do as they please, bending even powerful nations to their will.
hah, my comment appears much more naive than I thought possible.
WPS apparently has 80% market share in Chinese government and state owned enterprise. They used MS from 2000-2005, In 2006 they released Uniform Office Format (UOF) which MS doesn't support(!?) UOF works better with Chinese fonts. 2012 Kingsoft offered Enterprise WPS and became the standard.
Yeah, but they're already gone, and you can only milk them for so much. Businesses and governments are a totally different matter: they're not going to switch to the alternatives no matter what, so MS could make a lot more profit by jacking up their prices massively. $10,000 per user per year is totally doable I think.
Don't underestimate the rage from citizens who receive important documents and sheets in formats they can't open. Or you can open them but with a warning that some functionality might be lost. (reads like: you might go to prison)
I can't think of any official documents I'd be getting in Office file formats. Forms are mostly web ones or in some cases PDF, read-only documents are PDF. Maybe you can submit some documents or attachments in the Word format as a citizen but I wouldn't be surprised if PDF is already required anyway, or an image format for scans.
I'd be more worried about document interoperability between government agencies and other organizations such as companies that do work for the government. The government could of course mandate contractors to use an open source office suite which would extend the need for training to those companies.
Also, I've seen some orgs make heavy use of Office formats in terms of e.g. surprisingly elaborate formatting, document history and comments, and although I haven't tried to use those in LibreOffice, I wouldn't be sure it supports all of those in the same extent some people have learned to use them in Office.
My gov is moving 100% of documents, forms, official stuff to web based without browser plugins. Of course unfortunately if you want to download/print (...) it will be pdf, but outside that, all filling in, editing, reading etc of all citizen facing materials must be possible with a modern web browser. If PDF is only the export for the final doc, I am ok with it; I can fill ut with whatever browser on whatever device. This should be the mandatory basics imho.
Things can be done in such ways that there is nothing visibly incompatible (ie scripting behind some forms), you can always just print and fill the document if needed, and anyway most documents are static pdfs with optional plus for filling some fields in computer.
For us it isn't a very big deal. We will dig out the data points with our bare hands if we have to. (in ways that would make a data analyst scream) For normal users the experience is more like ransomware.
I really hope that happens but I see those announcement as negotiating tactics. Switching will cost a lot (in training, unavoidable delays and mistakes etc.) and both parties will have incentives to go back to good old days.
I hope I am wrong on this. I hate that public infrastructure and bureaucracy runs on Microsoft.
I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally.
Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
> It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck.
Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
> not economical viable
I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
>Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse.
I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck.
The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat.
He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed.
Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks.
That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work.
But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
> > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
> The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now.
I think the problem is different: those who are capable of pulling off such a task commonly lack the "business credibility" that is necessary so that C-level executives would buy a product from them.
Getting the skills in all these disciplines is a much-more-than-fulltime job. If you spend all your time cramming, you simply don't have time to build this "business credibility".
On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(
Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”
Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.
Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful.
Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered.
Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland.
You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price.
Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.)
I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days.
The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way.
And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
> This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.
Is there? Maybe Google docs.
It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
The truth is, only a fraction of your users needs MS products so much that they will die on this hill. Legal, accounting, maybe procurement. That’s it. For everyone else Google Docs are actually better.
Google Sheets can do a lot, especially if you have automation tool like Zapier. Excel is no longer a moat or the moat. Powerpoint… jain. It’s cool, but Miro and Figma eat that cake nowadays.
With its integrations and Turing completeness, unlike word processing or presentation- if it requires excel you just need to use excel. Even Mac Excel won’t work.
No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that.
And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
No one uses sharepoint because it's good or was ever good, everyone knows it sucks. They use it precisely because it's a) bundled with 365 already and b) already very well integrated into the rest of the entire ecosystem. No developer time is needed to get automations, external sharing with encryption, and any other numerous features.
So sure, one wouldn't build another SharePoint on its own, but there's still room to build an entire package like M365 and do it right, and integrate solutions that don't suck.
But no one does, because it's expensive as hell. Good luck building something just as comprehensive and integrated and selling it for a measly $22/user/month.
Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead.
It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.
A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.
Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.
It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight.
Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects.
I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.
You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
Cheap is the same reason I ended up on an M365 family plan before they stopped allowing custom email domains. I'm grandfathered in, but I will probably end up paying more for just email when they decide to cancel the feature, plus needing to find a place to stash my off site backups.
They don’t have customer support. Otherwise, they would make much larger inroads. Most businesses don’t want to take the risk migrating to paid Google services for that reason.
That's wrong, I don't know where you're getting your information. Enterprise plans absolutely provide support, and I've never heard of that being a sticking point in migration to Google. Are you confusing it with the free consumer versions?
My interpretation is that you can look at the code but vibe coding means ultimately you're not writing the code, you're just prompting. It would make sense to prompt "I'd like variable name 'bar' to be 'foo' instead." and that would still be vibe coding.
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