They had Office.com, a hub website, and a desktop app called Office that was basically just a wrapper for said hub website. They also had a mobile all-in-one app called Office. As far as I can tell, those are what are being rebranded and made to default to an AI chat view on login, not Office as a whole.

Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.

  皮 kawa
  彼 kare
  波 nami

  > And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?

Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.

For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.

  > From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.

For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:

  Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.

  ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。

  人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。

For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:

  졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지
  Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.

It's somewhat hard to believe that Japanese sits in some magic spot where a phonetic script wouldn't work just fine when Korean does it fine, and on the Sinitic side people write books in pinyin, Vietnamese is phonetic, and the Dungan people write their 3-tone Mandarin dialect with cyrillic alphabet without even notating tones.

> Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people.

It's not just hard-headed stubbornness - reading kana really is more difficult to proficient readers of today's Japanese, and change is work.

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.

EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...

There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY

You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.

That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDkR87zHdXk

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

Old Japanese videogames couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations. They wrote in all kana but used spaces to make the text easier to read.

Modern Japanese children's books and eg. even Pokemon games still? Same thing, kana and spaces.

When Korean transitioned away from Japanese-style mixed script to purely alphabetic writing, what did they do? They adopted spacing.

The only time "but Japanese doesn't have spaces" comes up, ever, is when people argue against the removal of kanji. It's not a realistic scenario, in light of very recent history and current practice.