Is...Is Microsoft Actually Good Now?

I don't remember what the monthly cost was, probably $10.00 a month

Okay, so, we have inflation correction of $8.86/dollar and that phone line would be $88.60 today. But you couldn't take that with you, others in the same house had no problem listening in, and if like ours, the operator could as well as neighbors on the same party line, and as you mentioned, the long distance charges were horrendous. Do you remember being charged exorbitant fees for a long distance call with crackling and hissing almost louder than the party on the other end? Kind of makes that $300 bill actually sound reasonable. Let me see here, that would be only $33.88 back then. Wouldn't someone have considered paying that for portability, lack of static noise, and privacy?

Sorry. You can complain about Bill's policies, but not about the great improvement in phone service for what is actually a reasonable charge.

The 2 biggest problems I have are the fact that you can no longer 'buy' the software. The executive board wants stable income so they rent you the software. The excuse is you get upgrades free but that is mis-information. You used to get upgrades really for free...remember when xp sp2 came out? Did you have to pay for it? This is as stupid as renting a router or cable box when you could just pay for it with the yearly rental fee. Consumers wind up paying rental fees well over the cost of the product's value...if you think renting windows is any different I have a bridge to sell you.

The second problem is in the TOS that you have to agree to. Every time I click agree to a TOS in for something I regret that I am living in America. The corporate lobbiests have bribed the government to give them access to all the data they want while fooling the sheeple with the illusion of privacy. The funniest thing is conspiracy theorists are screaming about the govt spying on them while clicking away their privacy to corporate america.

I wish Ayn Rand were alive today to write a remake of Atlas Shrugged.

Drew K

And that reply has what to do with phone service? Lyn and many of us are getting on in years and tend to think the past was all rosey, so he got us off on another track complaining about cell phone charges, and while I agree with the software / Microsoft and so on issues, I stopped and thought about what we actually get and how it was when Ma Bell was a monopoly in phone service, and despite what seems like horrible costs for cell phone service and rotten billing tricks, they really aren't. You do get what you pay for when you look back to the 1950's telephone deals. I might like cars/schooling/food/restaurants/and on and on from back then, but the phone costs are really not so swell back then, considering what you got.

Rosey was right....

back in the landlines, what other item or thing would interrupt your supper where you'd drop everything to address it, (answer the damn phone).

Back then, it was only when you're home, Now, no matter where your are, or what your doing its the cell phone will interrupt you (actually most people) where you drop everything 24/7 to answer the damn phone.

I have to agree about todays phone, my biggest plus for the cell phone, is GPS. Otherwise, they can either leave a message or I'll call them back later.

But we've strayed far enough from the topic.

back in the landlines, what other item or thing would interrupt your supper where you'd drop everything to address it, (answer the damn phone).

Well, if you were a bit late starting supper, the $64000 Question game show was a drop everything / must watch TV show, with even the President hooked on it, and we see how that turned out. Manipulation to give greater returns is nothing new.

And just how many of the whiz-bang features of your new phart smone, that you pay for, do you really use.

Back to MS 365.

My Office 365 has 17 "features" that I'm sure my company pays for. I use the Outlook and the calendar.

On very rare occasions Excel.

Really? I don't know how many, but the ones I use are necessary, now. I am not sure how I got along without it for so long. I just got it a year ago when my daughter got stuck by her ex with a 2 phone contract. I didn't touch it for 3 months, except as an emergency device when riding bike in the woods, then I realized it was a mobile internet browsing machine. Hot Dog. No more running back to the desk in the office when I want the manual for an instrument on a skid on the production floor. No more waiting for a 6 minute boot up when I need to know how to repair a bicycle part at my house. Same thing with that DCC train decoder trouble shooting guide - right there on my phone. Not quite sure where that bicycle shop is located in Buffalo - bingo - map in front of me. Need a camera on the floor at work - bingo - it is in my pocket.Throw out the home PC. Throw out the GPS device in the car that really never was very good. Forget taking my own $500 camera to work to take pix of skid wiring, or trying to cart it along in a bicycle bag. Oh, my bill is around $70/month - this is an out dated phone and I NEVER use more than 0.01 Gb as WiFi abounds where I use it, so no gross data charges. A bit more than a simple cell phone, which I paid $20/month for and NEVER used, and it does so many other tasks for me. No comparison to a landline/party phone, for less inflation corrected money.

Office - yes - Excel / Word / Outlook / Power Point - the first 3 every darn day at work, and the other occasionally.

I wouldn't worry too much about it, because it really amounts to nothing more than...

As long as the market can bear it, the price reminds high.

BTW, were you shared the line with 7 other families, you forgot to mention that was also the earliest form of social media. We had on our party line a social media network called 'Grandma Anderson'.

She listened in to all the conversations and made it her duty to spread the word.

As far as the original post, when I went to college (80's), we had no IMB computers to work on. There were all Apple (that I knew of). And this is where Apple could have excelled more market share if they could have been more open with 3rd party software development.

The downside, Apple would have had more viruses sooner.

The bigger question is would you trust them with the security and confidentiality of your online data?

I bought a computer with windows 10 on it, and put in the end room, where I played with it to become familiar with it. I think some of the programmes are childish. May be aiming at a younger generation?

Don't forget that it records and stores every keystroke you make, every spoken word you utter and all your passwords, bank account information and any pirate software you may have on your machine, and reserves the right to use, sell or otherwise exploit that information any way it pleases.

It also can highjack your computer for any reason it wants, in the name of automatic, non-negotiable "updates".

Yes I respect what you say, I still use windows 7 on the internet.

It is getting better.....more user friendly...still room for improvement...

Just a quick correction...I called it Office 360, but it's Office 365, which I suppose makes more sense in this context (365 days in a year not 360 degrees in a circle).

I have a couple of Underwoods and a Royal sitting around. Sometimes I'll use them to give my fingers a "workout". Or when I want my poetry to look old fashioned.

I would buy these black and white cancelling ribbons so I could flip the lever and erase my mistakes.

Underwood was the name I was trying to remember! I know it from Steven King books, I think he always referred to it in an evil context.

Drew K

Gotta hand to Microsoft with the Xbox 1. I'm not a huge gamer, though I do play. But it has displaced the need for any cable box or media player in my living room.

It's good to hear that somebody likes Microbloat. Win10 may be a good operating system once installed but I had nothing but a nightmare trying to migrate from Win7 to Win10 on an old laptop. It technically worked but since the video card driver was not compatible the main CPU had to crunch all numbers and almost overheated.

It is really troublesome to me, having bought a laptop with something like 20 GB of memory, and all the crappy Microsoft stuff in Windoze 10 uses up so much of the machine, that there is no room to load my game on it.

I remember when 20 MB was a big hard drive.

remember when 1 meg of RAM was more then enough RAM and at $500.00 a meg. Yaaa.... that was Awesome....

1 Meg of RAM?!?!? Holy smokes, I could only afford to upgrade from 256K to 512K with my 386SX-16 and the optional math co-processor. And that's when DOS would boot in about 8 seconds. When Windows 3.0 came out, I was in heaven. I bought MS Word for Windows 2.0 and MathCAD 4.0. With Windows I no longer needed Norton's Commander file manager.

386-33 baby... I was just going to buy it, but could get a hold of the guy, it was just before Christmas... I was a little disappoint. The following Monday, I finally got a hold of him, and he informed me that memory just dropped in price... from $500.00 to $100.00 a meg. I loaded it up with 4 meg... unfortunately, I only got a 40 meg hard drive. He said I'd be disappointed with it and should up grade that to 80 meg and yes, eventually I was.

and just a few years prior, Some commodore owners thought that 16k was fantastic.

i purchase my mathcad I beleive it was 3.something. I had some of norton tools that I used 10 years after that.... the sweep.com was great. It even found things in hidden directories. No one could figure out how I did it.

Now that you mention it, I think I bought 3.0 initially and then MathCAD came along and offered upgrade disks to 4.0 for pittance. I still have the disks. I wonder if it would run on XP?

I think I bought 3.0 initially and then MathCAD came along and offered upgrade disks to 4.0 for pittance. I still have the disks.

Well, I wouldn't hold that against you...... this time.

I wonder if it would run on XP?

Unlikely, but that never stopped you before.

You're on. I'll let you know how it goes. I still know how to get a command prompt.

When you rent the software, is there any motivation for Microsoft to make it any better?

Is it good? No! Just somewhat LESS bad than before...IMHO!

First thing I do when I buy a new computer is uninstall Office and install Open Office. It works quite well and is compatible with Office and other products. http://www.openoffice.org/

You are aware that after Apache bought OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems, they basically fired everyone who was working on it and hired a new staff.

The former developers of OpenOffice created a new 'fork,' continuing what they were doing best with the software. This new fork is called LibreOffice. www.libreoffice.org

I have heard nothing of this and will check out the new system. In any event there are very competitive options to MS Office available for free.

I tried Libre a while back.

I didn't like it as well as OpenOffice. I think it was slower than OO, but for whatever reason I went back to OO.

It may be better on his machine, I don't know.

I wouldn't know. I'm still plugging along with XP and Office 2000 on a used HP office computer upgraded to the max.

Crappy W8, 8.1 and the threat of W10 caused me to reconsider Unix/Linux/Ubuntu and I switched about 2 years ago...installed it on all my systems and have never looked back, the software that came with the package, all works well and the Draftsite package I added runs seamlessly, I've been pleased with all. It's well supported, I have the option of 'cloud' storage (opted out), and I've added thing I like to 'play' with, my only expense being a very small learning curve. (expletive) Bill Gates and Microsoft. As far as the phart smones my 5 year old LG and Net10 provide excellent service for appx. $15/mo. (I don't spend much time on the phone). If an EMP takes out the towers, I have a Kenwood general coverage transceiver for backup that can be setup in short order, and AARL has the ability to transfer info around the world. Meanwhile Ubuntu provides me with an operating system and NO aggravation.