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With you on that my friend! In a long career I haven't yet come across a well-designed browser app whose UX is anything like as good as the native equivalent. Even with all the fancy JS or other libraries, browser app UIs remain awkward and clunky.
And don't get me started on touchscreen cellphone apps.. Uggh!
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Rage wrote: Please give me my IT world back from 10 years ago - Everything has only been going downhill since then.
1000% agree. My husband I discuss this ALL the time. He provides infrastructure support for consulting clients and I'm a developer. They want to move everything and everyone to the cloud, with degraded experiences. Every week, some kind of update makes things worse - less secure, more buggy, worse UI. We've been in the industry for over 25 years, and things used to get better, but now they do not.
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Totally agree. But we are currently porting our, huge, business system to a web application, and one of the primary jobs involve interacting with documents and opening them in an editor.
Without MSOffice online, we wouldn't be able to do that.
On the other hand, if MSOffice wasn't online, I could have shut down that design fart real quick.
"God doesn't play dice" - Albert Einstein
"God not only plays dice, He sometimes throws the dices where they cannot be seen" - Niels Bohr
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I totally agree! I am forever amazed at why people think it makes sense to abstract the entire computer through a browser. Software distribution isn't the challenge it once was, but it seems people are still trying to work around a problem that no longer exists.
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Quote: Please give me my IT world back from 10 years ago - Everything has only been going downhill since then.
There's the problem -- you thought it was your IT world (a.k.a. your computer and software).
On the bright side, I can now setup a computer without out installing any MSOffice software. When a user must deal with a legacy MS document, I point them at the web app. I realize this isn't an option for most people, but it is liberating for those of us who can live this way.
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Who ever thought running everything in a browser would make for some nice consistency should remember what Emmerson said: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
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I dream that one day the browser basically gets gutted and everything swings full circle.
In that imagined utopia browsers pull and launch containers and guide the user to permission control granting varying levels of container access to the real metal.
The desktops may be many different flavors, but everything wants to be desktop client/server and web app becomes the old dirty thing some people have to maintain in some cases but few want to actually greenfield.
...And JS grabs a room forever with COBOL.
It's a far better way with far more possibility and much less headache. Web/micro services and such all remain and do all the heavy lifting they do now.
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You know I see web apps as just another way to sell more development tools, more training, and more metal. I have been in this industry since Bill Gates was using Paper Tape. The wheel keeps going round and round reinventing what wasn't broken. We went from Glass House to the PC Revolution to Client/Server and now back to the renamed glass house called the Cloud. I haven't seen anything browser applications can do that can't be done with Remote Desktop Protocol.
There is a reason COBOL is still around.. IT JUST WORKS! There is a reason Microsoft hasn't killed of MS-Access yet (though they have threatened to many times).. because there are Billions of lines of VBA code out there and IT JUST WORKS!
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There's a reason everyone was so happy to have a PC (Personal Computer, that is -- one that was NOT part of a mainframe, not under an IT department's control) back in the 1980s.
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libreoffice ? free
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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Tell me about it.
It drives me bonkers, because (and I've proved this time and again) the damn browser cannot keep up with my typing speed.
Pound for Pond, I make 4 times more mistakes using O365 in the browser than I do with the desktop version, and then I have to spend a chunk of time going back and correcting stuff, that are only misspelled because the browser missed a key press and didn't put the letter in I expected.
I get exactly the same problems in text boxes like the one I'm typing this in, but not as many, because it's not trying to do a million other things at the same time.
I bought MS-Office DVD 2016 a very long time ago now, and I still regularly use that for my day to day work, MS still updates it with the rest of my windows updates, beacuse I regularly see stuff get changed around and "updated for the better" (Yes that was sarcasm...), and occassionally I'll get a scary message saying:
"woooo.... no longer supported... etc etc, the nasty viruses are going to eat you if you don't upgrade... woooo"
But I just ignore them and continue, it works perfectly fine for what I need it to do, and if I do need to make some edits on the run, the free "Office" editors I have as part of my regular free MS account do the job just fine.
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Choosing Office 365 is a choice. Microsoft still sells MS Office as a desktop application. (And myself I use the desktop one.)
As for why Microsoft or any company is looking at SaaS rather than products because the point of a company is to make money. That apparently surprises people when the claim they look for a 'better' product and yet still, almost universally, shop for the lowest price.
SaaS is considered a better revenue stream because it more predictable and recurring. And that is something that all companies, not just tech companies, look for.
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Totally right. No more sales people scrambling to book revenue for quarter X.
Of course, once you start renting, you are at the mercy of the landlord. You will spend half of initial savings on your legal team.
I see a future where a CIO is routinely asking app teams to replatform 5000 servers from Azure to AWS to Google to IBM to Oracle etc to save a few million dollars over a few years.
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englebart wrote: I see a future where a CIO is routinely asking app teams to replatform 5000 servers
I would expect either a CIO or COO to be asking for that even now.
With that many servers they should already be working with something that should make a move like that easier. If not then they are going to be losing money because they will not be able to do flexible sizing.
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I'd love to know how they come up with the estimated times to restart your PC for a Windows update. Do they just see how long it takes on the top-of-the-range development machine with a nuclear powered CPU and liquid nitrogen cooling and hard code that time, or is there some "cleverness" that theoretically looks at the actual PC concerned and makes an estimate?
Today's update was estimated at 3 minutes. Actual time to get back to a "normal-looking" screen was 16 minutes. It was 22 mins before CPU and disc usage dropped enough to make it usable.
Does anyone else receive more realistic estimates?
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I've got 5 minute estimate - and I have one of those top-of-the-line computers you mentioned...
(Not actually let it do the update yet)
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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I selected to restart and then went to make a cup of tea. When I came back it was ready for me to log in again. It actually took less time than usual to log in and be useful again. Less than 5 minutes all told.
My PC is reasonably speedy but it's not nuclear powered or liquid nitrogen cooled.
Phil
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the author, especially if you find them impolite, inaccurate or inflammatory.
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Rich Leyshon wrote: I'd love to know how they come up with the estimated times to restart your PC for a Windows update
It's inversely proportional to your necessity of having a working machine.
So, if you are just turning on your computer for grins then it will only take milliseconds.
However, if you have an imminent Teams meeting with all 3 of your supervisors and you've just woken up for the day and your machine must be on, then it will take days. 
Yes, this is based upon my own experience. 
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Now, there's the correct answer!
Though I've found it's usually then followed by a Zoom update, that is pretty quick but trashes settings and screen layouts so you can spend the first minutes of the meeting fumbling to get those reset; and that's always a meeting where someone has to ask you a question in the first 10 seconds!
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My update was bit off - like 12 minutes instead of 5...
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ― Gerald Weinberg
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I always try to schedule it for overnight so I don't have to think about. Until I come back to the machine and ask why the heck none of my applications are open.
Hogan
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I agree with this. I try to process any updates as soon as possible so that they don't have the chance to interrupt me later on.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Same here.
I had a coworker (since retired) who would put off updates for days. To complicate matters, our IT dept. had an application on our machines that would display a window reminding you to reboot that had the "stay on top" enabled. It could be moved out of the way temporarily, but it would move itself back center screen once an hour. He would calmly move it back, every hour  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: He would calmly move it back, every hour  .
After having some problems with HDD encryption (Based on Hardware) after adding a second ETH-Card and all the fight I had with the corporate HelpDesk... I do exactly the same with the "you need to encrypt your D: - Accept - Not Now". Lucky me it only appears 3 times per day.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Nelek wrote: "you need to encrypt your D: - Accept - Not Now"
We have that with McAfee Endpoint Encryption. I got so tired of dismissing the dialog that I wrote a little app to watch for the popup and to click the button that dismissed it.
Software Zen: delete this;
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