this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Of those four, only Outlook really could have used some changes. The other three were perfected 20 years ago. And how do you improve perfection? You can only make it worse.
Outlook is lousy, but what gets me is the fact that basically all "email, calendar, rss and chat (maybe)" apps are pretty bad. You'd think someone would have implemented something better by now.
Excel is perfect, PowerPoint doesn't need to be any better.
Word is a terrible text editor and its layout algorithm is lousy. You can make better-looking documents by converting markdown to html and then applying some css; modern browsers have much more sophisticated styling options than Word offers as "styles". You can make much better looking documents with Latex, which is pushing fifty years old now.
Both ways let you edit text files in a superior editor (which should be Vim, of course - the most superior editor). Collaborative working and revision history with Git, which runs none of the risk of Word just randomly deciding to shit itself when those features are enabled.
Fine - Word can retain a "compatible layout" mode for all those ancient documents where people have paginated by pressing enter 17 times exactly, and the line-breaking, hyphenation, text colour etc. algorithms cannot be updated. But for the rest of us, let's push things forward.
The average office worker has no idea what those words mean, let alone how to use them. Do you seriously expect a run-of-the-mill HR worker to write css? Memorize latex commands? Resolve merge conflicts?
Naw my man. Word sucks, but its point-and-click, drag-and-drop, type-on-page UI is the maximum level of complexity a user can handle.
Creating a simple intuitive UI for document editing is hard. I’m not saying Microsoft succeeded at creating that with Word; but let’s be honest no else has either.
My wife moved from WordPerfect (pre-Corel) years ago to Word strictly because all her clients were using Word and she got tired of converting things to work on their machine, especially when printing it out. Not because it was a better choice. This is Microsoft's only power, dominating the market. Brilliant business strategy, I'll give them that. Why they don't use it to be better at the same time baffles me.
Synchronicity. Just found this love letter to LaTeX.
What is the point of writing better software when the entire ecosystem is built around Microsoft? Though certainly Zoom ate Skype's lunch, and Slack is better than Teams... but maybe e-mail is too core a functionality, and, let's face it, there's old guys at the top that will fire their entire IT department before they get rid of their precious outlook. All my PST files for the last 20 years are on there! I have 200 inboxes and 400 rules!
Interesting thoughts on Word. I just know for what most people use it for--documents--it's perfectly fine. It drives me up the wall that people pay for 365 subscriptions just so they can do that.
I really don't want an AI 'summarizing' and changing the meaning of the emails that come in like an automated game of telephone.
Hell, in the majority of cases the summary is longer than the email.
AI is great at giving the appearance of work being done, but it sucks if accuracy matters.