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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Fair point, but I'll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I've tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn't work, thumbnails don't load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn't work, etc.
I know that if I can't get them to work right, there's no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn't matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how "creative" various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.