I don't think that's the case, but I only have anecdotal evidence for that. I haven't ever worked at a company where Office was the preference, and the last three I've worked at didn't even offer it as a default. And I'm in my forties.

Tapping the breaks on that one.

You don't wanna do that. The whole thing could shatter!

Not being able to paste a jpg of a screenshot into an Excel sheet embedded in a Word document is a feature.

I posit that the vast majority of users of Office would be just fine with any of the lightweight web app equivalents.

They acquired practically everything they have. They haven't created anything truly new since the mid-90s.

It wasn't that they destroyed it, it was more that they let it bit rot. Skype was honestly never a great user experience by today's standards. The audio was bad, the connection was very unstable over mobile networks, and push notifications for calls was hit or miss. Microsoft acquired it, slapped a Microsoft login screen on it and then basically didn't do anything to improve it. Meanwhile, Google created and killed seventy different video calling apps, which all worked better than Skype, and Apple stuck the landing with FaceTime.

I think that Microsoft is paralyzed by corporate culture. Everything needs to be signed off by multiple stakeholders, everything needs a dozen meetings before anyone can make a decision, and as a result the stuff that's "good enough" (read: still making money) languishes--or worse, becomes a dumping ground for whatever corporate pet project is exciting--until it's unacceptably awful, mired under decades of technical debt and spaghetti code fixes.

At least they have the sense to let the successful companies they acquire manage themselves. There's no AI in Minecraft, for instance.

It's not that internet explorer was good that made it successful, it was packaged with windows where Netscape wasn't. People used the one that was already on their computer, then as they got market share they extended http to encourage sites to make stuff that wouldn't work in Netscape, and couldn't due to patents

By the time Microsoft was forced to unbundle IE and windows it was very hard for Netscape to get market share back

Office is still very successful and probably won’t be gone anytime soon

Unfortunately for almost the entirety of the corporate world and govt bureaucracy.

Fair enough, I stand corrected.

Libre Office is also missing one very simple thing which means I personally can't use it for anything more than a few pages, let alone 100. A normal static scroll bar with static buttons on it. It's a program literally centered around scrolling up and down, and your only option is spinning a little wheel or grabbing an invisible handle. I use OpenOffice.

And from TeamSpeak.

No, of course they didn't invent the word. But they popularized the composition of the bundle (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software) and the idea of calling that bundle an "office suite," a pattern which almost all such suites still follow today.

This is because Microsoft intentionally breaks excel and PP compatibility with Google docs in small but important ways. It's the only thing keeping them afloat at this point. I have gotten into heated debates at work over this, because I prefer Google docs, but my boss will be like "we need to deliver this to customers who will open it in office and the formatting will break" and I'm like "that's what a pdf is for."

I would doubt it, it is nowhere near as good as office and google sheets specifically has much smaller worksheets than excel, with only 26 rows.

As far as I can tell, Google Docs is at feature-parity with Office, and yes, is incredibly popular. The contest might be a bit more even in the corporate space, but at the last three companies I've worked for, GSuite was the default and you had to ask for Office.