mccI just this second drew the line in my head from "Microsoft is one of the companies who is convinced ChatGPT is a good thing and is telling its shareholders it's going to try to shove this brand of 'AI' into everything it can" and "Microsoft owns my phone keyboard, since they bought SwiftKey" and, uh… shit, maybe I should audition AnySoftKeyboard sooner rather than later
At almost the exact same time they rolled out this update, Microsoft deleted the public support forums. The public uservoice/feedback/feature request thing. They appear to have just removed it completely from the support site and old links to it 404. What an interesting coincidence.
Kevin Karhan 
Michael Roberts@kkarhan Because some of us don't have a choice?
I'm a technical translator. I *cannot* do my job, I mean 100% cannot, without Windows, because the entire industry runs on Windows.
So I run Win7 in a VirtualBox on my Ubuntu machine. And I run a 2017 Microsoft Word for document access. But that's the absolute bottom limit of exposure, or I don't *have* a business.
@vivtek That's very sad to hear...
At least you keep your stuff somewhat airgapped.
That being said, #LibreOffice does #MicrosoftOffice files pretty good.
@kkarhan Believe me - not well enough. Lots and lots of fiddly formatting. I've tried.
And the EMA (European Medicines Agency) *requires* Word to be used for redline documents - those used for tracked changes.
@vivtek How's that even legal?
This should be a direct violation of directive 2014/24/EU which bans the specific preference of brand names in specification.
https://youtu.be/duaYLW7LQvg?t=835
After all, we ain't talking about reasonable requirements like contrast ratios, colours, paper sizes, font sizes, margins and legibility requirements...
The Microsoft-Dilemma - Europe as a Software Colony (Full Documentary, 2018)
@kkarhan I hear you, brother, but I'm not a European lawyer, so I can't tell you.
From a practical standpoint, they have to be *very* careful about even minor content changes in approved texts of things like package leaflets and clinical trial protocols, and I suspect they just don't have the wherewithal to push a whole content standardization effort through (though it would certainly improve a lot of the process).