shrug I think the same, but it's a fact that new versions of Word heavily integrate with Sharepoint and Teams. I don't use that functionality (at least not a lot), but for some businesses it's the primary use case, and it's how Word can manage to stay relevant even when competing with Google Docs. The concept of 'files' is going away slowly anyway, like it or not. (I don't, but again, nobody ever asked me). There's more - like, when you install a new spell checking language pack, something accesses the internet. It's most likely the installer/automatic updater 'service' that does this, but then you're again in the 'what's this process for anyway' territory.

My point - I think your view on how software 'should' behave is the same as mine, but the reality is that our view is outdated. It's just not how software works in 2023.

It's actually timely for me, as I just started using Glasswire with a clean ruleset. As I'm typing this, freakin' explorer.exe asked for network access to an outside IP address. It's hard to disallow explorer.exe network access as I won't be able to access SMB shares without it, but I have no idea why it would go outside my network.

I did just block Word from accessing the network at all. I guess I'll find out over the next few days in what ways it will break.

(that's another thing - most software nowadays doesn't even handle not having network access gracefully any more, if at all. Sometimes you just get blank parts of a window (presumably when embedded HTML views silently fail) and there is no way to 'reload' those parts of the UI. Or windows that don't open at all, so it just looks like a button doesn't do anything. And so on. It's disgraceful and like I said upthread, many of today's engineers just think it's normal, or are told to implement it that way against their own convictions. I mean I understand why things are they are, I just don't agree with the lack of effort in fighting back against the drivers of that outcome.)

That might have been the case 20 years ago (and even then Office had functionality to self-update).

Now, with OneDrive, cloud storage, Exchange, SharePoint, etc, people expect that Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc should work seamlessly with multiple users simultaneously editing documents.

Even IDEs and code editors have ‘network access’ now—VS Code can download and update itself and any extensions, connect to remote SSH hosts and GitHub Codespaces, use extensions that themselves connect to the Internet (like Copilot), etc.

People have come to expect some form of self-updating mechanism now even for the smallest programs (consider Rufus, an ISO burning program which can update itself, download ISOs to burn to USB drives, etc), and it’s counterproductive to just blanket-ban everything from accessing the Internet, as things are likely to stop working as expected.