Do I sense some inner tensions due to frustration with using Microsoft’s sorry excuse for an OS?

You have zero reading comprehension. Good job wasting your time on a pointless rant.

But they don’t have to make any OS “office-wide”. All they have to do is

1. move from a centralized micro-management of every workstation to a scenario where users can be provided a prepared workstation, but may configure one themselves
2. transition to a security policy that assumes every single workstation is insecure, and regulate the network traffic to allow only those protocols that are required for the business, protecting each machine from the next (this would prevent so many major security incidents where a single machine gets compromised and then the whole network is affected)
3. provide central infrastructure as open protocols - IMAP (or POP3/SMTP), HTTPS, FTPS + file & printer sharing as desired
4. enforce open formats within the enterprise

If necessary (assuming you have really irresponsible users), before authorizing users to set up their own machine, they can do a qualification check - or have the user’s line manager approve the “individual setup”.

This would enable power users productivity and even if you don’t change anything for the vast amount of users, it would pay off rapidly. If you can move regular workstations away from the bloatware that is Windows, you would boost the overall productivity immensely.

Specifically, what I am arguing against is:

• locking users into an eco-system for any kind of service (e.g. MS Exchange servers, MS Active Directory)
• outsourcing your IT competences to Microsoft (because let’s be real, that’s the actual reason IT departments go for Microsoft: corporate IT is outsourced as a service, this means lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder will happily take Microsoft’s offer to take care of any “real” issues and only provide a really, really dumb and helpless first level support)
• having tons of services listening on every workstation that no one ever needs (just open your windows control panel (while it’s still around) and check out all the running services, of which you could disable > 50% if Windows would let you, without impacting the operational state of your machine) and each one presenting a vulnerable interface to the network

This comes full circle with everyone’s grandma incessantly calling every piece of software on their computer “The Microsoft.”

If you think this is bad, then you haven’t tried navigating the MS academic offerings. Over the last 10 or so years, I think it’s been called “dreamspark”, “imagine”, “MSDN Academic Alliance” (I liked this one, it actually made sense), “MSDN AA”, and now “Azure Dev Tools for Teaching” or “adt4t” when talking with support.

rant mode ON

Everytime the name is changed, it seems something else changes (OK it’s a new product) and the way to access installers and activate it differs. I just want to teach, but every couple of years I have to spend days trying to figure out how to get my iso’s and how to renew the subscription. A couple of years ago, and mind you this was after I had had an active academic relationship with Microsoft for 8 years, and my predecessor even longer than that before me, we had to submit invoices proving that the school owned the domainname for our emails and website, as well as a letter from the ministry of education that we were licensed to teach this course.

The support staff is very professional and helpful, and we’ve always been able to resolve renewal issues. But each year we have to go through the process of getting through a maze of support pages linking to chatbots, to find the correct form to contact support. I think the link to support form had the text “Beware of the leopard”.

They didn’t rename just the in-browser version, they renamed “Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows”