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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

#41

Post by lewisjoe »

Good insights on the trends in word processor markets. But, including rich text editors and note-taking apps into the word processor market is bit of an overstretch.

Note-making apps are typically for digital screens, with a limited set of tools for document creation.

Word processors cater both for digital screens and print media. They'd have a richer tool-set and are for power document making people.

Interestingly both categories have made lots of improvements recently, when it comes to sharing, reviewing and co-editing.

Take, Zoho Writer (https://www.zoho.com/writer/) for example. The product beautifully carries the ease-of-use of simpler apps, without compromising on the richer word processor features. This takes the game one-level up. Simple writing apps now have to bring in more document creation features to compete in the market with word processors. Otherwise, they are just their own category with their own market.

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

#42

Post by daniel_iversen »

I’m disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it’s a good article! Wish they wouldn’t call it “word processor wars” though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it’s about a more collaborative content creation experience.

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

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

npunt wrote: post #13
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #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.

Agree, data lock-in is probably the biggest concern I have with any new productivity or note-taking tool. It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization. I don't know about other tools but at least with Airtable I know I can always hit the API to get my data, though I will miss out on certain business logic around it like data validation, and probably a lo…

> It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization.

It's not tough. All it needs is to allow me to download the data in whatever format you actually use to store it, or some serialization of it. Myself, or other interested parties, can reverse-engineer it if they're too lazy (or too much into abusive business models) to provide documentation of the format. It's simple as that. The lock-in isn't in the format, it's in the inability to get the full document (and possibly reimport it later) in any format at all.

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

#44

Post by TeMPOraL »

sachin wrote: post #9
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #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.

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.

> So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point

Could you instead provide an option to bulk export all my notes to my own drive, via a .zip file?

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

#45

Post by jen729w »

amphibian87 wrote: post #28
jen729w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

Because it tries to do far too much and fails at the basics.

Keeping track of the margin/indent settings for bulleted lists across a 50+ page document? Shambles.

Trying to guess which header you want and insisting on auto-formatting the wrong one, time and time again? Infuriating.

Weird behaviour where it promotes the penultimate paragraph to a section header if you delete the last paragraph of a section?

Deeply confusing and hidden ‘Styles’ functionality that affects the visual layout of your document in ways that a beginner couldn’t possibly understand?

I wish I’d kept a blog of Word’s infuriating behaviour over the years (except at the time, all I want is for the thing to let me finish the document I’m being forced to work on so that I can stop using it as soon as possible).

And they just keep shovelling shit in to the product. STOP IT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

The worst part is that for 95% of the cases, Word is entirely unnecessary. I’ve seen – god help me, I’ve written – 100+ page corporate documents that could just have easily been put together in Wordpad using RTF. But no, it’s got to be in Word. The thing is a fucking curse.

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

#46

Post by dijit »

gnicholas wrote: post #37
npunt wrote: post #12

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up". A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption. A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

I'm British,

Never heard "bottoms-up" to mean the same as "bottom up"

Bottoms up is when you finish your drink.

Bottom up is sitting on a high surface (put your bottom up, usually said to a child), or lifting something from the inverse of where it's normally handled from or, like the parent said: a set of business strategies.

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

#47

Post by Mikeb85 »

Elrac wrote: post #27
dvtrn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this truly attributable to what Excel is actually capable of (excluding those cases like people who manage to accomplish things like 3D rendering with excel) or that Excel just has better market saturation and is, by default, the only spreadsheet tool people in the Enterprise are given to work with and we just normalized ourselves to what it does, but maybe not so many other spreadsheet file formats?

I also think Excel is great; but not because it's Excel or heavens forbid, because it's a Microsoft product, but because it's a spreadsheet. The ability to throw data in a grid and massage it with operations the average human can understand - that's invaluable. Certainly, Excel is powerful and feature-filled. But 95% or more of what I do in Excel I can also do in Google Sheets or Libre Calc or whatever.

This. All of what I'd ever want to do to a spreadsheet Google Sheets can do, and whatever the 'power' Excel user thinks is a good idea to use Excel for I can do far more easily in R.

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

#48

Post by netcan »

There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one.

My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur.

The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?

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

#49

Post by rusk »

jen729w wrote: post #22
SllX wrote: 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…

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die. Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells. Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to…

My two weapons of choice:

Excel for structured data, Emacs for unstructured data.

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

#50

Post by rusk »

jen729w wrote: post #45
amphibian87 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you like Word? I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written. It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things. At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

Because it tries to do far too much and fails at the basics. Keeping track of the margin/indent settings for bulleted lists across a 50+ page document? Shambles. Trying to guess which header you want and insisting on auto-formatting the wrong one, time and time again? Infuriating. Weird behaviour where it promotes the penultimate paragraph to a section header if you delete the last paragraph of a section? Deeply conf…

Word is hard for detail-oriented people like programmers. I want to be able to control and tweak every single bit just the way I like it, and it frustrates me that it just seems to think it knows better a lot of the time, or that it doesn't let me undo its mistakes in any obvious way.

But when it comes out at the end, it usually looks fine. I try to remember that it's the paper-based outcome that Word is designed around, so ultimately for the intermediate digital artefacts "just fine" is good enough.

I'm not saying it's right, but most day-to-day users are probably fine with it.

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