Introducing Modern Comments in Microsoft Word

@ChromeRefugee  Awesome!!!

DrGMHunt  my guess is the answer is as simple as it is troubling:

• MS in their ivory tower are too full of themselves and think their newest concoction is the bee’s knees, and arrogantly presume that there can be no reason whatsoever why anyone ever would want or need to do things differently.
• they presumably intend to phase out the old code eventually, and want to crush any hopes of sticking with it immediately.

There is a pattern here - this is the same circus time and time again. They push any stupid update on us without warning and without any chance to opt out because they need us as their Guinea pigs since public testing is cheaper than proper beta-testing, and simply insist everyone adapt. Then they lie that there’s nothing that can be done until someone else finally figures out the switch is really just one or two registry entries or group policies that could easily be a toggle in the program settings if they did not want to deliberately deny you options.

Quite frankly, I think it is about time that serious lawyers or politics take on this bully behaviour and restrict what kinds of changes software companies can force on you without requiring you to opt in or at least allow opting out. And while we’re at it, things would be far less problematic if those corporations would actually face legal consequences if they messed up. Of course, the current situation with the comments function is more of a nuisance than catastrophe in the grand scheme of things, and there have been far worse update blunders before, but maybe those developers would put a little more thought into things before they recklessly and with impunity push out rushed updates for ‘public tests’ that break people’s productivity out of nowhere, if they were liable to at least some degree for the damages and lost time. Not a legal expert here (but I think a few might be if I recall correctly that a few people in this thread are editors for legal firms), but I assume they are pretty much on the safe side and can tinker with updates as they please, because they allowed themselves to in the EULAs no one reads anymore and just agrees to frustratedly when there’s a new one every couple of months. Indeed, this whole Windows (or Office) “as a service” mantra is a joke, and presumably a legal scheme to wiggle out of responsibility for the software PRODUCT I use. And this has to stop.

(I apologize – once again - for the slightly off-topic rant, but as you can tell those ‘modern’ comments still have me worked up; but this is not the first rodeo I have with MS's update policy)