Enshittification forces me to sever my 30+ year relationship with Microsoft Office products.
I cancelled my Office 365 subscription today.
I didn’t think I’d ever drop Word and Excel. After all, I know these two applications better than any other on my computer.
Apparently, all these apps come with Office 365 now. Who cares? All I want is a word processor and spreadsheet that works just like it did 20 years ago.
These apps made it possible for me to leave my last full-time job, in 1990, to start a career as a freelance writer and computer consultant. One of my first gigs as a freelancer was teaching Word and Excel — and Lotus 123; remember that? — in classes of up to 8 people for a computer training organization and its clients. I wrote three Microsoft Word courses for them.
The first book I wrote for Peachpit Press, way back in the 1995, was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6; I also wrote Excel 5 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide and the Macintosh Bible Guide to Excel 5 the same year. I followed that up the next year with my first Windows book, Excel for Windows 95: Visual QuickStart Guide. Over the years, I wrote a total of 22 books for Peachpit about either Word or Excel and even managed to write one about Outlook for Microsoft Press, even though I only used it for about a year or two for my own personal email needs. More recently, I self-published a little book that explains exactly how to sort data in Excel; it still sells more than 10 years after publication.
My first training video was about Microsoft Word for macProVIdeo back in August 2006. (What a great trip to Vancouver for that job!) I then went on to author another four Office-related courses for Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) between 2009 and 2014.
When I needed to keep track of hours flown and maintenance due for my helicopter, I did it in Excel. I also used Excel to keep track of mileage and stops on my Great Loop trip. In fact, I’m likely to use Excel more than anyone you know who doesn’t have a job requiring them to use it.
And Word! Hell, it’s a word processor and I’m a writer. I wrote dozens of my books in Word. I’d even fire up to write a quick note.
But my mutually beneficial relationship with Microsoft Office has changed.
It started when they made Office subscriber-only, forcing users to pay an annual fee with promises of regular upgrades. What they didn’t mention was that Office apps would start to “phone home,” to make sure they were installed on a computer owned by a user with a valid subscription. Failure to access the Internet when it needed to do one of these checks resulted in problems. It became unreliable as a tool when I traveled with my laptop. Who knew when it would force me to log into the home server?
And, more recently, they added AI features that can scan your documents to “help you create, communicate, and collaborate more efficiently.” Pardon me, but bull-fucking-shit. The last thing in the world that I need is an application that’s sending the text of every single thing I write to a faceless server in a data center somewhere. How long before one of my phrases or descriptions appears in some generative AI text based on the prompt of a stranger 6,000 miles away? And who else has access to this info?
If you turn these options off, forget about accessing the onscreen help and templates that you paid for as part of the Office 365 package.
Of course, turning this off means tracking down the settings to do so, which are buried behind a button labeled with the benign phrase Connected Experiences inside the Privacy preferences. (That should say something to you.) Click that button to find settings in an all-or-none setup. You can’t turn on the second check box to download templates and access online help unless you turn on the Turn on all connected experiences check box. And, of course, that first check box admits that it will send your content to someone or something somewhere.
It was the inability to access Help from within the app with this crap turned off that really started to bug me. But do you want to know what the last straw was?
The message that appears in my blank Word documents, before I’ve had a chance to type a single character, a message suggesting that I use the Copilot AI to draft my document.
This is what Word looks l like now each time I open it. I disabled the AutoUpdater it put into my System settings, as well as another autolaunch app that apparently checks my subscription on their website every time I launch an Office app. How else would it know, only 15 minutes after the fact, that my subscription was cancelled? The only way to get rid of that dialog box is to force quit it.
And we thought Clippy was bad.
I am a fucking writer. I wrote for a living — and still do get paid to do so (although not as often as I’d like) — for more than 20 years. I do not need a fucking AI assistant to help me draft a document or even to check my GD grammar. I want these features turned off with absolutely no clue left behind to hint that they even exist.
And I want to access onscreen Help when I need it, right from within the document. How about like it was in the old days, when you actually got help files installed with the app instead of a menu command dumping you into a forum where someone might or might not have the answer to your question?
And when I contact help and choose the chat option because I’m not likely to understand the heavily accented script-reading voice of the overseas-based support team, if it says the average wait is 2 minutes, I don’t expect to wait 16 minutes. You’re running a GD computer. It can’t calculate average wait times? Bad enough I wound up spending 54 minutes of my day trying to get a solution. Yes, I timed it!
And I don’t want my computer connecting to the Internet every fucking time I launch one of your apps. If I subscribed last March and the app checked in then, it should not need to check in again until this March. And I certainly don’t want it sending the contents of my documents to your server to play with in ways only vaguely discussed in your 50-page, lawyer composed terms of service.
I want a work processor and a spreadsheet app. I don’t want an assistant or content thief.
When I finished with the chat, I had a solution alright. My solution was to cancel my Office 365 subscription, which was due to renew next week. I then went directly to the web site for Libre Office and downloaded it. After 30+ years as a Word user and “expert” — I think authoring 24 books and 6 video courses about Office products establishes that — I’m switching to a different word processor. I hope it’s as good as everyone says.
And if it decides to start phoning home, I’ll be writing in TextEdit.
