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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/technology@hexbear.net
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[–] 8 points 2 days ago (15 children)

Microsoft really needs to give a lot of their corporate customers an ultimatum that they can't keep using out-of-date extended-support software. It must be a nightmare maintaining all this old crap and having to keep updating and patching it. It seems kind of unmaintainable.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 days ago (6 children)

    The latest affected Excel version is 2024, hardly "old crap". This sounds more like a severe QA issue, that department has been deteriorating for years.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 days ago

    It's not just Microsoft. They're all dealing with this right now. ESRI has destroyed a ton of their existing systems with vibe slop and just "updated" their community forums with a vibe coded version that can't even handle markdown properly and uses async functions for handling keystrokes (which are all logged for AI analysis) meaning that if you type over 20wpm the characters come out in a random order lol.

    I want to die.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

    Is Excel 2024 the same as Office 365? Otherwise that's another extra version they're maintaining.

    I have also heard, as you said, that they've "downsized" their QA department.

    Regardless, Microsoft seems to have an unfathomable amount of software that they maintain. Like, why is Microsoft Server 2012 still in the extended support window? The fact that even today they're still doing major long-term versions based on year seems completely antiquated.

    They keep bending over for these antiquated companies that have a terrible development process that traps them on old versions of software. At some point, the US government needs to step in and force all these companies to modernize and invest in tech.

    Companies are basically offloading the cost of maintenance onto Microsoft in a really inefficient way (keep maintaining old versions with patches), instead of just upgrading and staying up-to-date with the latest version.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    They keep bending over for these antiquated companies that have a terrible development process that traps them on old versions of software.

    This is Microsoft's bread and butter, this is exactly how they made it this big and this is where the money is at (nowadays they probably earn way more on Azure tho), the problem is not the business model (even tho I imagine it's grueling shitty work for the devs), the problem is the management cutting corners wherever possible.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (2 children)

    I think at a societal level that is a bad business model. It makes no sense to maintain old software just to delay the work of upgrading (which only becomes harder over time). Software isn't a car or a building, there's almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    there's almost no cost to frequent updates and modifications.

    That's absolutely not true at all for the vast majority of domains. For example there's a reason a lot of financial computer infrastructure still runs shitty old COBOL code and it's not just laziness and lethargy, there is real cost to rewriting it and then extensively testing the rewrite.

    Sure maybe you're right, maybe the risks and upfront work would pay out in the future but it's not like being conservative with these things is highly unreasonable and just a result of laziness.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago*

    I guess I was mostly thinking about it from the user side of software, not in-house software. If it's in-house there's a cost to any kind of software changes. But keeping someone else's software up-to-date usually involves running some backups and migrations, updating configuration, planning out deployments and so on. Still takes work and planning, but the more frequent the updates, the less work it is. Of course, things become end-of-life and then you have to potentially have to make "in-house" changes that take a lot of work. But it seems like a lot of companies are on LTS versions of things just because they didn't take the time to plan how they were going to do upgrades. So because they don't have the processes in place themselves, they outsource that to Microsoft to maintain the existing versions indefinitely.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Maybe they could start by not making each new version of their software worse

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago* (3 children)

    New versions might be better if they didn't have to spend 50% of their budget maintaining 10 year old software for some random US company that has such a messed up and underfunded IT/software department.

    Of course it would help if Microsoft hired more people...

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Microsoft also signs service contracts with these companies wtf are you talking about? Even mega corpos have “old” software because new software won’t run on old infrastructure that no one wants to replace.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago*

    At my job in the past two weeks ive seen Windows and Office updates break shit twice. Although the Windows update broke a non-MS application but still. Now we wait for a patch by the software dev. These aren't old OS's or hardware.

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