On January 10th my Microsoft 365 subscription expired and I am not going to renew it. And will be avoiding it going further, at all costs.
There are quite a few reasons for that:
- I have Proton subscription, which I will need for Pass and VPN, at least, so I can use Proton Drive instead of OneDrive. Since Proton does not allow same "sync" I had to get a bit creative, but i did realize, that I do not really need a personal laptop (so selling it), and for syncing with my phone, I can still use app from MetaCtrl, as before. Just instead of OneSync, I will be using AutoSync and SMB in my local network. So no syncing over cloud, but I do not remember doing that outside of my home, so that does not matter that much.
- I use Word and Excel only for very light editing these days, and using their online versions should be fine for me. In fact, Proton now has Docs, too, which I plan to try. I guess they will bring Excel alternative in the future, too.
- Outlook... Well, will break the list here, since it's a big thing for me, and I did not care for anything else in the subscription, really.
I got really used to Outlook at work. It was a really good productivity tool. Not just emails: calendar, tasks. I could see all of those on 1 screen at once, nicely and neatly sorted in respective parts of the screen. Technically, this is not gone, it's still doable, but it will not stay forever with the push of "New Outlook", which is essentially a wrapper for the web-version. And that would be fine in general for me, since I rarely need majority of features that will be cut from it, but the overall layout is still different and more "Google-like". It does not feel like a productivity tool for some reason. Maybe it's just the fact that right side-bar now can only show either calendar or ToDo (with the latter just replicating the ToDo app, nothing more), but I think it's something deeper. Which could still be ok, but I've been forced into "New Outlook" twice. That is I opened Outlook and it suddenly was the "new" one.
Which is another reason not to support Microsoft. Not the fact they are trying to, obviously, unify the codebase (just in a wrong way, not realizing, why Outlook was great), but forcing their choices on users. This is why I do not like Apple, and never could really use their operating systems: it always felt like "we know best". Microsoft is forcing Win 11 on people (although I am using Win 11, and it's fine for me). Microsoft used to force Cortana. Microsoft used to and now is once again forcing use of Edge (although I am using Edge for now). Microsoft is forcing Recall and Copilot. Oh, and TPM for the sake of more PC parts in the landfills.
They are forcing a lot of stuff for the past few years. I get it, they do want people to use their products, but this is just out of line. Quite often this is boils down to "either you use it, or you do not use anything from us, or we will make you life a huge pain" (setting default browser, for example, or using a local account). That's anti-consumer, in my mind. That's strong-arming the users. Kind of similar to what Adobe does, really. And I have not even touched the topic of privacy here. Because I have way more to say about support.
It's bad. They use a community forum, where you can rarely find posts from employees (at best you can get an ambassador). They use completely separate issue reporting systems from product to product, with most of them not having a way to track progress of a ticket (if that one is even created). What's the official way to report bugs or issues with Windows? it's Feedback Hub. Which, essentially, goes into void, and I am not sure you can even review all of your past submissions (I think you can only see your "suggestions", but not issues). The only way to speak to someone at Microsoft (allegedly) that I know of is through Support Chat in Outlook. And even then the experience sucks.
I already shared an example before, but it's not the only one. After that issue was fixed, (or around the same time at least), another popped up - ToDo was sending me reminders for tasks with no reminders. I reported this, there was lots of back and forth, in the end I tried playing with ToDo and Tasks in Outlook, and was able to figure out the replication steps. In short, recurring tasks get recreated with a reminder time, but the reminder checkbox is not checked. In ToDo it is shown with grey color instead of usual blue. One would think that it implies "disabled", but that's not the case: sometimes (but for some reason not always) it still gets triggered.
I think communication about this was going for 3 months now, at least. There was one chat, it got closed due to no updates in neither from me nor from Microsoft for a long time. I started another one (2411210040008527), they told me, that I should be able to see past request in the support sidebar, but... That's not the case. Unless I am stupid. Then even after several videos (besides the one I uploaded to YouTube), they still have not acknowledged abnormal behavior and the past several weeks were "discussing it with colleagues", even though it was clearly explained to them, what's exactly the bug (and it's not in Outlook per say, but rather in ToDo), and what needs to be done to fix it.
A few days before January 10th, I told them that I am dropping the subscription, so won't be able to receive any updates from them, so they should contact me via email, if there will be any progress. Doubt it will ever happen, but that's not the point. The point is they said "no, don't go", and I said "you will force New Outlook on me anyway in the future" and they responded "No, Outlook Classic will always be there". Yeah... Right. After my subscription expired 3 things happened:
- That support chat is no longer available. It seems like I can start a new one, but previously active one is gone for me.
- ToDo app on Windows crashes for me. And I know it was working exactly the day before. The Android app does seem to be working fine, though.
- Outlook Classic is...Well, it still technically works, I guess, but... it's different. Like, very different now. You can see how it looked before this on the video linked above, and this this how it looks now:
It's like a completely different app. As if it's now "corrupted". I did not even do anything with it, just restarted it, thinking it may be related to how ToDo is crashing. So much for promises of it Classic Outlook to stay there.
This is really frustrating. Honestly, I'd be happy to switch to some Unix distro, but I do play games (which may not be compatible with Proton Layer even, although things are improving there almost daily, for sure), and it's just a huge pain to do. I no longer want to tinker with my system. It's enough that I have to do that with my web server. But reality is, that if Microsoft does not start changing their approach, it is possible that I will have to bite the bullet once they get an update that will require payment or will be forcing some arbitrary things, that you can't disable/change yourself. And I am sure, this update is nearing with all that talk of Windows 12...
