Screwed Again

This appeared in my inbox:

I got the Skype bailout email a week ago or so and promptly cancelled my account. It’s a shame. I had a Skype number and would use it to make calls from my desktop. It’s nice to have another number when you call businesses so that you don’t get pestered on your mobile. It was a pretty good deal too. Between a subscription and a number it was around $60/year. But it ruined for me when I needed to delete a number I used for a business. You can’t. So I’d get calls all day long and had to light up Skype only when I needed it. I still need a second number to give to those I don’t want to call me. Google Voice is an idea, but I hate them more than Microsoft.

But Publisher evaporating is a big deal. I have gigs of content in Publisher. This is the line that got me:

Before October 01, 2026, convert your existing Publisher files to PDF or Word format. After this date, you will no longer be able to open or edit these files with Microsoft Publisher.

I’d also add that you probably won’t be able to open those files in anything else either. This is not an insignificant task. It’ll take me weeks, if not all year to do this and I’m not sure I’d need access to all the files all the time. Lucky for me, the end result of all this content was a PDF anyhow. But every now and then, I need one of the source files. Take a newsletter. Lent is coming up. To do a new newsletter, I would start with last years. A lot of the same events are happening. It would take less than an hour to update and I’d be done.

But that’ll end.

You can’t open them in Word. You can’t edit them in Word. It doesn’t work the same way. Word being shitty is why I started using Publisher in the first place. And, you need a pretty expensive package to edit them in PDF, which is also the wrong tool for the job. The other tool they suggest is Designer, which is a cloud only imaging app. What’s wrong with setting publisher in amber and letting it be out of support, but you can still use it? Why strand your customers, orphaning their data, and costing them money to convert to something else?

I’ve used Camtasia since version 3. Each license I have allows me to use any version I want, any time. Even if I let my ‘subscription’ lapse, I’ll simply be stuck with the last version I had.

One company that loves their customers and wants them to use their apps, and the other that couldn’t give a shit.

Nope. I’m out. I’ll not renew when the subscription is due in November. (And don’t get me started on subscriptions). I’m going to start using LibreOffice, and migrating to Linux on my desktop.

Since I have a fairly new iPad and an iPhone, I’m thinking very seriously about replacing this desktop with a Mac Mini. I bought one back in 2005, and I used it until no more apps were supported on powerpc chips – nearly five years. And even then, it was frozen at it’s OS, but all the apps that were on it worked. I think my kids used it until 2014 or so. I migrated from an Ipad to iPad mini in 2014.

I replaced it last year – a decade later. Moving to Mac would enable my desktop and devices to all work together. There’s value in that.