Tag Archives: office

Microsoft’s existential threat

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Very interesting point made out by this blog post by Patrick Rhone, about how Microsoft’s core business faces an existential threat:
MS office on Flickr

Microsoft for many years had convinced the world that, in order to get “real work” done, you needed Office.
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Then, she explained, the iPhone came. There was no Office. People got things done. Then the iPad came. There was no Office. People got things done. Android came. People got things done. All of those things that they, just a couple of years ago, were convinced they needed Office to do. They got them done without it. And thus, the truth was revealed.
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Like the curtain finally falling from the Wizard of Oz to find just a small, frail, man pretending to be far more powerful and relevant than he really was. Microsoft’s biggest miss was allowing the world to finally see the truth behind the big lie — they were not needed to get real work done. Or anything done, really.

And that will be what ultimately kills them.
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Via Gruber.

No RegEx in M$ World?

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The other day I got an XLS file exported from a client’s Microsoft SQL Server. I had to import the data into MySQL, and I thought using CSV would be the right way. But there was a problem – the XLS cells had newlines in them, and exporting to CSV use to mess up, and the only option was to remove the newlines in the XLS before exporting.

So I needed to remove the newlines in the XLS file. I was at a friend’s place. So I used his computer to open up the XLS file in Microsoft Excel XP, and looked at the search and replace function. “Now how the hell do I specify a newline?” . I looked through the clippity help, but couldnt figure it out. Googled, but found that there are “add-on” products available for a price which lets you do that.

Disgusted, I came back home, opened the file in OpenOffice.org, used its search-and-replace Regular Expressions (regex, in short) which allowed me to specify a newline , and cleaned up the XLS before exporting.

This got me thinking. Even in its rather new version of Office, Microsoft(M$ in LUG parlance) doesnt provide a regex replacement function. What is it with this company? Does it find its user too dumb for its products? That they can figure out pivot-tables, but cant figure out simple regexes?

Regex has been around for years. Perl has been here for such a long time and regular expressions have become synonymous with it. Text editors in the Unix world, like vim, emacs, etc. have been having regular expressions built into the editor for a long time. Why, even Javascript has had regular expression objects since 1.2. Have never worked with that killer development app from M$ – Visual Basic, but I am guessing there is no default support for regex in it either. I wonder if its Visual Studio IDE has it at all.

When will M$ learn, and start trusting the intelligence of its “power” users, and start putting features in its products, which have been a given in the FLOSS world?

Interestingly, search-and-replace in OpenOffice.org spreadsheet can be done on all the sheets at once, but again in Excel, you have to buy an add-on. :)