Not so thrilled as a customer either

Their Azure customer service is beyond atrocious. I have 6 days old completely untouched tickets on their paid support plan.

There's never been a better time to leave either

Sure, just let me run this multimillion dollar multi-year project past management. Reasoning? "Lol M$ is sux"

What is your business using instead of Excel?

90% of the business just uses Sheets. There's a few accountants & finance people who still need Excel.

Depends, really. My exposure to agriculture and manufacturing sectors says everyone is still on Office 365 and Excel while digital marketing and advertising are almost all using Gmail and Sheets. Though it may also be location-dependent. I'm describing Europe, other parts of the world may be very different.

Not necessarily manufacturing. I led a Microsoft takeout at Sanmina (global high-tech contract mfr) all the way back in 2008-2009, and the result was 23,000 users moving to GSuite and mostly just Legal & Finance keeping Office as a fall-back only if LibreOffice wasn't sufficient. At the same time, several thousand Windows laptops were replaced with Chromebooks, and nearly all non-engineering workstations were replaced with ChromeOS devices or thin clients.

So you can’t migrate off then… and how is sheets (Google) better than Microsoft?

Google sheets

Orange and apples comparison.

Sure, they are both fruits, that's where it ends.

Your accountants are using Google sheets?

Nah. They are a dev and have no idea how the rest of the company works. They use Linux and sheets so obviously everyone else should be able to.

If I were to guess some frankenstein SAP system

If i could even find a comparable OS/Productivity/Communications package to replace the existing i'd lose my own job for proposing it.

Don't mave many options on the OS front. Windows performance gets worse and worse, increasing risk of corp enshittification, my task manager stopped working recently, but... I find Linux's workflow too rooted in multi-user systems and servers.

> I find Linux's workflow too rooted in multi-user systems and servers.

Out of genuine curiosity (not *nix/OSS fanboying) - how so? macOS has been a BSD for a quarter of a century and modern Windows was designed by a guy who cut his teeth at DEC on VMS. Virtually all modern computer OSes have roots in time-sharing systems.

The user and permissions system. I struggle with things being set up on the root account vs user and vice versa, occasionally breaking my system by editing config files or with CLI commands. Did that a few weeks ago trying to get my PC to read USB-serial without launching the program from CLI with sudo+pw. I had an extra newline in one of the config files; it didn't like that! I cannot follow the decision-making logic that I would need sudo to talk to my embedded device. I've heard the explanations about connected storage devices, but I cannot agree with it. On windows, the same hardware, and same source code (compiled to a different ABI) just works, because its permission system is not so strict.

It's indisputable that Dave Cutler designed both VMS and NT. But Cutler hasn't been involved in years, maybe decades. I'm not a Windows guy, but I am curious. It looks to me like modern Windows has gotten well away from any Cutler design. Has modern Windows retained any Cutler style design?