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The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

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Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#3
At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away.

A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how many CPU architectures or operating systems come along this century, and neither will Word. At some point software is just infrastructure. We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn’t an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down, and it isn’t like Word prevented Markdown and TeX and HTML from finding their niches.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#6
post #3

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away. A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how…

Some other important factor about the software you have listed is that they are actively maintained, either because they have a community or a profitable enterprise behind them, I don't think inertia alone is enough.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#7
One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#8

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility.

I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#9

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

While we have no plans to go anywhere at Notejoy, we do acknowledge that this fear is very real. So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point, so you can rest assured that you'll always be able to take them with you.

Re: The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

#10

Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.

We've tried to focus Notejoy on being as intuitive as possible to support any kind of team. Because of this, we've seen a variety of teams beyond just startups adopt Notejoy, including coffee shops, law firms, freelancers, agencies, coaches, and more.
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