Another differentiating factor is the wavy red underline for misspelled words, with the implied meaning that unless you choose the right words, a diplomatic email could result in rivers of blood, or red ink. Being a metal head, I prefer the former, since a passionless life is the death of a million paper cutes.
Oh, there were a bunch of things like this.
For example, in Teams, you can type an at sign and then start someone's name and it will autocomplete their full name so you sound like an angry parent scolding a child. But, you can hit backspace. So someone wanting to address me as David does @Dav{tab}{backspace}.
But a lot of other cultures have very different conventions for names. Indian ones are a staggeringly bad fit for this, which is surprising for a company whose CEO is Indian. There's no way of both notifying an person and using their preferred form of address for a huge number of cases.
While you’re speaking of names and Microsoft, I wonder if you might have thoughts on this? For years, before names were standard in spellcheck, MS Word spellcheck suggested changing Jennifer to guanophore. One of those words is much more common than the other. Seeing all the misogyny in tech go mask off, I am more and more suspicious this was the result of someone’s nasty breakup with a Jennifer. Is there a more logical explanation?
No idea. There were a bunch of really embarrassing ones. I think 'Indians' in Word 6 had a grammar check suggestion saying 'Did you mean lazy bastards'. That one got fixed very quickly, but that was long before my time (and I wasn't in the Office team).
@david_chisnall @JMMaok Are there any sources for this one? Would go straight into my trivia notes :)
I couldn’t find a reference online, but it’s hard to know what to search for. I remember it being discussed in the early ‘90s.
That looks like it. 30 years ago, so my memory is a bit fuzzy.