this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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How would you prefer they say it? Unless you mean to say they're not within their rights to stop giving away a product?
They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don't think anyone is saying that windows is not "within their rights", they're saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.
Honestly though I'm struggling to understand why you'd think that's about Microsoft's rights to begin with??
But if it's not being developed (that's my assumption as I haven't touched WordPad in many, many years) and not many people are using it (again, I'm assuming based on my own personal experiences and those in the workplace), what's wrong with removing a legacy system?
People complain all the time about Microsoft retaining legacy systems, often seemingly detrimentally, so here it is, an opportunity to remove a legacy system, but now it's bad?
I get that not everyone has Word. But Word isn't as paywalled as it once was. There's the web version of Word, that's free to use with a free Microsoft account. There's Google Docs, also free with a gmail account. And there's of course OpenOffice and LibreOffice, obviously free. So users have options for word processing that are better than WordPad.
The specific complaint was "gross corpospeak". Let's go ahead and use your explanation of the situation instead of mine, as it is indeed more accurate: how would you disseminate this change to your customers in a way that's not "gross corpospeak"?
I can't speak for the original commented, but I'm personally quite tired of the thin veneer that's slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.
For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I'm also annoyed that MS isn't being straightforward about it.
I mean, I think they literally provided the preferred, truthful version of the statement?