That's a big part of the continuing appeal of Apple in spite of some of their mis-steps. My Mac mostly just gives me a working system that keeps working and is mostly devoid of crap. The crap it does have can generally be disabled.
LibreOffice is absolutely awful from an UX point of view. That’s enough to put me off personally.
If you’re an office expert you’d probably figure out how to use it, but for me I’ve only used an office suite maybe a dozen times in my life so I’m very new to it, and latest Office 2016 allows me to get started easily (the much-hated Ribbon UI works for me and is intuitive), where as I find myself Googling all the time to do even the basic stuff in LibreOffice.
LibreOffice suffers the same issues as Star Office and others alike, and I think this is a reflection of how people get rewarded by developing open source.
Adding new features gives you a lot of fame. Fixing bugs and improving things does not.
LibreOffice is a nice thing until you get really serious and your day depends on a good office suite.
MS Office is complex, full of bugs... but it has all the things in place that a power user needs. They gave a big though about the things people need. The CTRL+Y after a CTRL+X on excel is a great example of that.
I have a love/hate relationship with MS Office. I would lave to have something better... but we're still far away.
Giving you the ability to use a computer now is not the same as it was back then and that's why Windows 95 was so important. Now it takes much more to make the same impact, but the mindset has changed. Windows 10 is an improvement upon Windows 8, not a complete rebuild of it. That's something that I doubt we'll see any time soon.
>> Giving you the ability to use a computer now is not the same as it was back then and that's why Windows 95 was so important.
This is only true if you lived in a vacuum. Windows 95 was important in terms of Windows/x86 users, but let's not forget that Macs existed at this time.
Windows 95 might have been prettier than Mac OS back at that time (at least that was the view of the Windows people I knew), but it was not leaps and bounds better.
I left Mac in the mid-90s for Windows 95 not because the the UX was better in any meaningful way, but because it was what I used at work. And while 95 in my opinion was still not as good as Mac OS, it met the threshold of being "good enough".
OS/2 warp was around as well. I never used it so I can't comment on how it compared to the other OS's. There just happens to be a boxed copy on a bunch of floppies staring at me from a shelf at work.
At the time there was still a large proportion of technically literate "power users" and the OS was built with that in mind. Now your use of your computer feels like it is at Microsoft's pleasure, not yours
>And it did just that.
That's true. Nowadays, if an OS only gave you the ability to use a computer easily, would people like it or hate it?
I don't know. What does Windows 10 provide beyond the ability to use a computer?