...laughing uncontrollably at its extremely poor quality

Every day, everything seems to get worse, whether politics or tech, everything seems to get worse.
Every day

...the adoption of robots

Learning to use new, immature tech is inherently problematic and we never get it right at first
The tech will improve and out way of using it will adapt

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

That's plausible.

I still hate it though. My first version of Office was 4.3, which included Word 6.0 and was ostensibly for Windows 3.1. I'd previously used Clarisworks on Macintoshes in school and before that I used a ghetto cheap program that called itself a word processor but was more of a glorified text editor in MS-DOS that worked well with an Epson dot matrix printer's formatting, so for me Word was great. I felt like the bumpers from Clarisworks had been removed, I had a lot more control over what I could do to a document.

Ribbon feels like they decided that power users didn't matter, and also corresponds with the end of the free Wordpad light-duty word processor and long after Microsoft Works was killed off.

They seem to have forgotten why some of their most popular applications became most popular in their respective categories, and that wasn't just leveraging their OS marketshare OEM install dominance. It was a combination of reasonably good UI design that had a degree of intuitiveness along with fairly easy access to more advanced features, with an added dash of the ability to use data from one application in another without major headaches. Arguably MS Office in the days before Ribbon and Metro UIs exemplify this.

Unfortunately they chose to change the UI for change's sake, ie, because users wouldn't recognize that they now had a shiny new version of the product if they didn't flagrantly change the UI, and they chose UI designs that frankly sucked. They also seem to have harmed that interoperability by trying to push too much of it when it doesn't fully work right.

Obviously there have been software companies that had products that for the professionals constantly using them were better, like WordPerfect to Word, but those didn't generally work well for both the power user and the casual user. Originally Microsoft had managed to bridge that gap. But Ribbon and Metro interfaces have harmed the power user, it's now harder to do things than it should be, and power users have incentive to look for software that gives them the features without the bloat.

I doubt that Microsoft is going to understand this in this revamp. They're going to try to cram some UI change solely for the purpose of making it different than the prior version, and even if it's now "native" it's still going to suck. And they're going to try to force any remaining users on prior versions of Windows off of those and onto Windows 11.

It takes a while to learn how to effectively use new tech, especially powerful tech that is rapidly changing
Expect more confusion and disruption before things stabilize

s'okay. Biology is the only scientific discipline where division and multiplication are the same thing.

They are continuing to follow fads and introduce new "features" that nobody wants, and that can't easily be uninstalled
They need to stop adding this crap, and provide easy ways to uninstall it
They need to use every tool they have, including AI, to find bugs and security weaknesses
If something is good, people will choose it voluntarily and even pay for it
If something is installed by default and can't be removed, it's likely not good
We need a reliable OS

The USPS was designed for letters. Now letter volume is way down and package volume is increasing rapidly. Small post offices that were designed for letters are overwhelmed with packages. Delivery vehicles are small. To properly handle high package volume, a lot of facilities would need to be upgraded or replaced

Does it work?
Kids are smart and really good at finding workarounds
The likely outcome is political theater, where politicians claim success while kids get creative
The other likely outcome is annoyance and failure when the tech goes wrong

uh, no. You didn't win.

Places like Bell Labs were more like university research centers than corporate dressing on mandatory-overtime grind. They were not expected to directly turn a profit as business units of the company, because what they did was to lay the groundwork for technology that the other business units could then adapt into products. The return on the investment paid into running them took years or even decades to realize. Without the pressures of needing to turn quarterly or even annual profits they weren't working their researchers to the bone and they were fostering a culture of internship for college students into joining their ranks as researchers to perpetuate the institutional knowledge.

Instead of using AI to "increase productivity" by quickly generating bloated, inefficient, bug-ridden, insecure slop, the better use of the tools is to find bugs, security weaknesses and unhandled edge conditions. AI research should focus on creating better code, bug-free, efficient and secure with all edge cases handled

*ow!*

uh, found it...