It's opt-out again instead of opt-in ?

And only adding the settings to turn that shiat off AFTER they've turned it on for everybody ?

Anything to make an extra buck I guess...

I rolled back my version of Word as soon as the piss-poor and fucking annoying "modern comments" feature was thrust on me without warning, totally breaking my workflow. Since then, I've prevented it from updating at all, just in case. While I'm aware that this may expose me to potential vulnerabilities, the alternative certainly will expose me to shit like this. I use my desktop as the prod environment, and my laptop is the canary for this sort of thing. So far, the changes I've seen through the upgrades are nothing but shit on a stick.

Modern comments. Just thiinking about that shit show raises my blood pressure.

There's so much demand from customers for the AI cruft they have to force it on them, then hope they can't work out how to not pay for it by swapping to the alternative plans.

Doubly annoying if the feature you didn't ask for actively gets in the way of normal use and can't be turned off.

Sooner or later the high running costs & lack of actual customer demand will kill this but there'll be a lot more desperate attempts at forcing it before then.

AI will finally become profitable when companies realise people will pay extra not to have it and start charging extra for "Classic" versions.

I suspect not as for the majority of users they will not even notice.

The subscription just renews, as long as what is included does not drop below what they actually use of consume they just keep paying.

The individual amount is low enough for most to not even notice.

I would also surmise some nasty surprises if you are using a custom email domain. Change your plan and suddenly what you have configured no longer works. I do wonder how long this is going to function as it is. You cannot make any changes since 2023 or setup a new one.

The Microsoft response is "buy a business subscription".

Now wherever you get that from it is a heck of a lot more expensive than the Personal or Family subscriptions.

Yes I know load on here will say that you should not use O365, use Libra Office or something, run your own mail servers etc. For 99% of the population this is not an option. Microsoft provides a convenient solution that people are familiar with.

I agree that MS provides a convenient option, but I can't understand how people didn't jump ship when they "modernized" the UI at some point while LibreOffice had an actually familiar interface.

Granted, MS fought very hard by making docx files hard to work with, but 90% of the population never used the features that didn't work.

MS users are doing it to themselves, even if alternatives are free, easy to find and better.

I regularly get docx files of posters to open in LO, turn into a PDF & then into a JPEG. They pose no problem except that she usually seems to add sufficient newlines to run over the page... The odd thing about this is that although they come from a Windows user she actually uses LO to create them. Maybe LO just creates better docx files. And can't LO on Windows create its own PDFs?

Don't give them ideas, for Petes sake

a letter to your boss, asking for a pay rise. Would you like me to insert a paragraph saying what a di*k head he is for not promoting you yet?

Or perhaps a few sentences that AI is cheaper than you.

They'd need to pay me a lot more than three bucks a month.

I’ve only just (re)installed Libreoffice for Mac having a (now) read-only MS Word. And… it’s totally fine, actually easier to find things on the menu bar, and that’s after using ‘ribbon’ UI for years.

And, no subscription, no telemetry, no annoying MS pop ups. It’s totally fine - and that’s just great!

Aaarrrrgggghhhh!

Thanks for the heads up - just discovered it on Word as described.

Probably means I have to kill Copilot again too!

We took out a couple of subscriptions to Copilot for testing purposes - they have not been renewed!

If you could have it in Word as and when you wanted it I could see some possible benefits, although I'm not convinced that overall it would save any time I did find it useful once or twice for giving a starting outline to a document, however to have it take up a significant part of the screen all the time and interfere with general work was just annoying.

I'm a bit pi**ed off about this. My kids have to use Word to do school homework. I don't know if it's just the desktop version or the web version as well (my kids have to use the web version to prepare homework submissions), but I really don't want Word offering to do their homework for them.

As much as I love LLMs/AI (and my kids' school encourages the use of AI as a learning tool), I do need my kids to be required to use their own brains.

:(

"The most interesting piece of feedback we learned is that there are times where our users want to turn off Copilot."

Next quote: “we will deploy education centres for these troubled users to emphasise the benefits of Copilot. In *all* situations. *No* exceptions.”

I was going to post the same thing

MS really do live in a parallel universe. People want to switch this crap off? REALLY? Are you sure? Well if they must, I suppose…

It just proves what we knew already - they really don’t take a blind bit of notice to their user’s comments. If they did then we wouldn’t see quotes like this

There’s a certain inconvenience to moving away from MS, however this is the straw that has broken this camels back. Just experienced it today on a time sensitive job and it’s so maddening and rage inducing…

An issue with a Word processor is causing you to change your OS? Do you change your car when the old one runs out of fuel?

> Press Alt + I

I see what you did there! High-five to the marketing team for coming-up with that: I hope you awarded yourselves Friday off for being so awesome!

Could I also suggest adding "Alt + R" for removing it? Even better would be Alt-R bringing a remove feature option for all of the items you've added over the years. Advertising in the task bar would be a good first candidate.

Blasted Generative AI. Worse than useless. We asked it to generate a picture of a pole-dancing Donald Trump having dollar bills slipped into his thong by MAGA-hat wearing men.

It refused. Guard rails or some safeguards or whatever. These tech companies have spent billions on this stuff and it refuses to co-operate. We want to mock!

Why do you need the image AI generated? Such a photo probably exists for real somewhere.

(Now where is the mind bleach?)

Wednesday I saw that "what's that ai.exe running here? From the office installation folder? Oh no..." on my work Laptop.

I've already added a few Applocker rules to block various MS-things from running, works quite well. But I did not have the time yet to test on that one, how much office will complain or fail.

If you want to play with Applocker: Let it add the default allow rules before you activate "enforce". And then block. Block overrides allow, but if the default allow rules are missing everything you try to start gets blocked. Your OS is done for if you are not lucky to have a powershell with admin rights open and your browser still running to find out how to recover from that. Guess how I know. (Yes, there are other way to revert that :D, which require reboot and/or boot from external drive).

Apart from the obvious annoyance at having something you don't want, the response Microsoft gave that they will be introducing a feature to turn off the bloody thing is TYPICAL. It is exactly how that shitshow of a company do things: Introduce something half-baked with the most obvious features missing. They do this with just about every product at the moment. Never mind the monopolistic way of waving their massive penis around acting like their in charge of our computers, what about some oversight into the quality of the 'apps' they peddle?

Our users (customers) are sick and tired of these seemingly never-ending changes invading our working lives. It's frustrating enough when you're doing something for yourself, but when you're trying to run a business and suddenly there's a new thing, it's a total waste of time. Microsoft pays lip service to productivity gains that their software gives you, and what little there is is eroded by having to learn about new changes every other month.

Come back clippy, all is... no actually it isn't.

Using the words “Microsoft” and “productivity gains” in the same sentence is an oxymoron

You're absolutely right come to think of it. Any productivity gain inherent in their products is just some feature to help you get over all the obstacles they put in your way. They seem to have absolutely no control over their codebase whatsoever.

The one good thing about 365 Copilot is semi-automated knowledge management. It knows how to find that document you wrote 3 years ago thats buried somewhere on Sharepoint and copy it forward and update it as a draft for your new use case.

Thats really quite powerful - and utterly irrelevant to the average home use as for some reason OneDrive on Personal accounts isn't integrated in the MS Graph API that does all the hard work for the AI in the same way Sharepoint is on Enterprise accounts.

In summary - 365 Copilot without Sharepoint is pants....

This is the ultimate information steal operation yet. Opt-in everybody to have their data sent to an opaque "AI" to spew bullshit at the users and copy "learn" from everything the user uploads, types and otherwise does.

It is any and all TLA agency's wet dream to be part of that game!

bollox, that crap is on my M365. Was hoping that it would not do that if I didn't purchase the M365 version going forwards

Fuckers

So once again, they increase the price, then change the contents of your current subscription.

You're now opted into something you didn't want and didn't want to pay for and, it's you're fault for not noticing there will now be a classic version without the ai garbage and exactly what you originally subscribed to.

Ohh M$ loves that bottom line, having to find a way to pay for it all.