151–160 of 165 posts
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Unrelated to the argument, but related to your arguing: you might enjoy "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"
I found their comment more interesting and valuable than yours. Just a data point.
Libre Office corresponds with M$ Office nearly 1-to-1 feature-wise. I’ve never seen a single person react to it’s apps as being unfamiliar or different, especially considering the variety of UI shifts M$ Office has displayed since Office 2k. If you were referring to some specific API and integration with Sharepojnt or something I might understand your trepidation, but as your question stands, I have to say that I can…
Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard…
> Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point I don't believe your conclusion follows the premise -- I'm not planning my business around an exit strategy, and we're gunning for being a large, private company not just a quick money spinner. As I've said elsewhere, it's also not about cost, but about open tools and an open ecosystem. I use LibreOffice myself (I run Linux, as do about a quarte…
In your intro you mentioned a series A funding and so I imagined the typical start-up which goes maybe to 50-500 employees before exit (or bust). If you are gunning to be a next RedHat or strongly driven by a Open Source strategy, I get why you would strategically invest in being a pure Open Source shop. If Linux drives your business then it is fine to go this way. Otherwise: The office stack is not a core part of your business so go with the thing that causes the least amount of friction in your company for a modest price.
Writer is a problem in that it is a straight rip-off of Word, which supports the same file formats, but which is not fully compatible with Word.
Word and Writer handle styles differently: glyphs change, despite availability of the same fonts; alignment changes; tab stops are all over the place.
They handle images and floating things differently, sometimes placing things on different pages or behind other objects or text. Word online makes this even worse, because it doesn't handle image captions properly, and converts the image and the caption to a second image.
I get all sorts of weird problems with Writer and Word - no particular blame attached - and unfortunately the answer is always the same: do your work in native Word on Windows, unless all your work is going to be in LibreOffice.
I think that the basic premises behind modern word processing are just wrong, and it's because Word is so ubiquitous that everything else has to follow it. I think there is a space for a new style of WP which takes nothing from Word, or Writer, and which lies somewhere between that point and professional typesetting wares like LaTeX or InDesign; something which does less more professionally.
But it's just a dream, and it doesn't really take into account Excel, which is Microsoft's killer app and probably the keystone of the company's entire business.
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In other words, the more ignorant someone is, the better they like it. That is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
But…are they ignorant? I’d argue that your UI/UX is successful if your lowest common denominator user likes it and finds it comfortable to use. I have seen a lot of software products fail over my career that was designed by developers who created UI that they liked and thought was the pinnacle of interface design. Users hated it. Most devs don’t think like regular users.
Complaining that something is wrong because it differs from MS demonstrates just such ignorance. Users not understanding that something could be different from MS and therefore better is how we got here.
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But…are they ignorant? I’d argue that your UI/UX is successful if your lowest common denominator user likes it and finds it comfortable to use. I have seen a lot of software products fail over my career that was designed by developers who created UI that they liked and thought was the pinnacle of interface design. Users hated it. Most devs don’t think like regular users.
I, also, have seen plenty of failed UIs designed by ignorant, inexperienced devs. Complaining that something is wrong because it differs from MS demonstrates just such ignorance. Users not understanding that something could be different from MS and therefore better is how we got here.
Ultimately a UI and UX needs the “U”
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I, also, have seen plenty of failed UIs designed by ignorant, inexperienced devs. Complaining that something is wrong because it differs from MS demonstrates just such ignorance. Users not understanding that something could be different from MS and therefore better is how we got here.
Ultimately adoption is all that matters. If your new and better interface isn't an obvious game changer to the lowest common denominator user of your product to get them to see the value and not long for their comfort zone, it’s not really new and better. Ultimately a UI and UX needs the “U”
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>LibreOffice usually can handle anything they are wanting to do. It just means a little extra time googling/playing around with it to work the same way. Have you done a cost analysis of what the sum of that "little extra time googling" adds up to? If it's >$10 a month, then youre company is flat-out worse-off. Especially when LibreOffice / Google Sheets just doesn't even come close to the ease of use or power that Ex…
You're completely ignoring the risks of locking into a proprietary software. It's not guaranteed that it's going to cost $10 a month forever.