Why I avoid Office 365 like the plague

For a few years now, Microsoft has been pushing its subscription-based model for their Office suite of programs, including Office 365, which is basically just a stupidified version of the actual software in the form of a web application. Bill and friends have realized that, instead of selling the same product over and over again by branding it as a “new” release, they can just charge yearly (or monthly) for the same product without having to make any changes to it at all. In fact, the 365 suite has become worse with time. There are many aspects of it that are flat-out unusable on browsers like Safari and Opera, such as Microsoft Forms.

Microsoft is no stranger to releasing web applications that are dysfunctional or otherwise completely broken on any browser that is not Internet Explorer… or, more recently, “Edge,” also known as Chromium. (Despite Edge essentially just being a reskinned interface for Google Chrome, Microsoft has still managed to have some things function on Edge and not on Chrome.) The company has a long history of having a double standard by way of functionality for other browsers. The sad truth is that Microsoft doesn’t care about making their products functional for the wide range of popular web browsers, despite it being easier than ever to do so.

The answer for this lack of browser compatibility lies in Microsoft Forms using ASP.NET Web Forms. (ASP stands for Active Server Pages. The URL displayed when initializing the form ends in aspx, or Active Server Pages Extended.) ASP.NET is almost universally recognized by the industry as an outdated technology with a long history of security issues and the very fact that Microsoft’s 365 applets are developed using ASP pages in this day and age should go to show that you should not trust any confidential information with this particular suite of applications.

Unfortunately, Microsoft (Office?) 365 is everywhere. As such, it is almost impossible to truly avoid. In the process of writing this post, the 365 suite has been casually mentioned in the context of a new version of Office being used to load a PowerPoint presentation. The best thing for me to do is keep using my WYSIWYG text editors and continue to dread any moment where it becomes necessary to interact with a Microsoft product, including Windows. (Any release after Windows 7 has consisted of a totally backwards garbage user interface, and now Microsoft appears to be shoehorning AI into everything they can, so I’m sure that its usability will continue to degrade beyond imagination.)