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Why Microsoft Word must die

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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#191

Post by nonchalance »

jebblue wrote: post #177
nonchalance wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market. And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100…

>> But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects Anything I've ever needed any of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice tools to do have worked fine. I don't think it does anyone service to suggest to projects which keep the proprietary Microsoft Office suite alive.

To successfully replace the office suite, in the beginning you must be able to interact with office files.

Joel Spolsky (member of the office development team) attributed their success to this:

> Microsoft Office ended up beating its competitors because it was able to read and write to file formats other than its own. For example, Excel was able to read files from Lotus, and was able to save the file without losing any information. The important lesson in order to gain market share was that in order for new users to try Microsoft Excel, they had to be able to work with the files their coworkers were creating.

> Lesson: You don’t want your customers to feel locked into using your software. It helps with sales cycles because customers know that they can switch away if they so choose. While customers will be willing to try your product, they think two steps ahead. They want to ensure they can easily migrate to a new system.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/05/07/spolsky-on-sof...

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#192

Post by n0on3 »

Nice piece; unfortunately it's not just about MS Word. It's pretty common for inferior/hurtful-in-the-long-term products to get leading positions in the market and become "unavoidable". The first easy guess is that marketing people are doing a great job for these products; the second one would be that the majority of us are too stupid/busy/unwilling-to-consider-long-term-consequences to spot their game and go for smarter choices. TL;DR: Please run humanity.upgrade(), we would think about their word processors l8r (:

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#193

Post by crazygringo »

jwr wrote: post #80

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Pages on a Mac. It's a style sheet-based tool, where the styles are quite easy to work with. I've been using it for years now and it does almost everything I need it to do. I realize there are people who absolutely need every little feature in Word, but for things like letters, technical reports, briefs or software documentation Pages works just fine, and produces nicely-formatted docum…

I came here to say the same thing. The first time I opened up Pages, I was amazed by its relative simplicity and elegance. It actually reminds me a lot of what Word 4.0 was like for the Mac, way back in 1990. I use it for all my personal things, and then Google Docs for business things.

So I don't know why the original article suggests competition is dead -- unfortunately Pages is not cross-platform, but Google Docs is certainly a worthy, simpler competitor (though perhaps too simple).

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#194

Post by normloman »

coryfklein wrote: post #186
DanBC wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, sing…

s/huge/expensive Most users don't care so much about the "size" so much as the cost.

Again, AbiWord and Libre Office are free.

You both got it wrong. It's not about size. Not about cost. It's about compatibility. People use word because their boss, publisher, or professor uses word. Because an entire ecosystem of office software integrates in word. Because kids taking a computer class in school learn Word commands, and nothing else. Because a perfectly styled document in LibreOffice doesn't always look right in Word.

More than 20 years later, Microsoft still survives off the popularity of DOS on IBM compatible pc's in the late 80s and early 90s. Their strategy since has been to further entrench themselves into our daily lives.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#195

Post by tanzam75 »

sixbrx wrote: post #156
wfunction wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, sure: - LibreOffice can't even show the simplest documents correctly on the same computer: http://i.imgur.com/0glr43F.png vs. http://i.imgur.com/g3a1332.png - Word takes 2 seconds. It's outright irritating to say the least. - Everything else has lags too. File->Save takes > 2 seconds to show me the dialog. In Word it's instantaneous. - No smooth scroll?? My eyes!!! >___ - No "Styles"?? - The UI just screams "LI…

> 1. Word highlights text word-by-word; I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting. Very often in my documents it simply will not properly recognize the boundaries of what I want to select, and small increments of the mouse produce jumps in the selection that were not intended. I think OO's behavior is a lot better in this respect.

> I find Word's attempt to highlight word at a time to be extremely frustrating and distracting.

Use the keyboard if you want to highlight character-by-character.

Word is simply optimizing for the most-common case: copying-and-pasting whole words, sentences, or paragraphs. It's a lot faster when you don't have to hit the exact character boundary of the word -- especially if you're using a touchpad instead of a mouse.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#196

Post by peatmoss »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #158
GuiA wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress. Word has version control though, and it's appreciated by many in academia. Version control for humans is a Big Startup Idea, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox and Github were trying to tackle it (from 2 different angles: Dropbox from the "how do we get average the user to…

Yes, but it only works when you use word. Yours sincerely, a graduate student whose thesis is written in LaTeX and then converted to RTF and then hand edited so his supervisor(s) can give him comments. I sent them a link to my github repository, but they never took me up on my offer :(

You're much better off converting your latex--provided you don't have a bunch of kinky formatting--to docx via Pandoc.

I've found that collaboration on documents via Markdown is not too crazy bad. Otherwise, I ask for comments on the PDF or on hard copy. Going back to latex from RTF is an exercise in madness.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#197

Post by normloman »

serge2k wrote: post #66
brymaster wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think that has to do with Microsoft's lock-in strategy and the fact that people only "know" Office in the corporate space.

Or maybe, just maybe, it could be that word is actually a market leader in terms of features and interface.

Have you ever been involved in buying software for a company? In my experience, nobody compares the features of different word processing software. In fact, nobody even mentions competing software, as if Word was the only choice.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#198

Post by tanzam75 »

yen223 wrote: post #74
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.

However much it cost Microsoft to build Excel.

> However much it cost Microsoft to build Excel.

More than that, because you have to replicate a lot of Excel's idiosyncracies in order to get compatibility. That's a very challenging task.

When Microsoft was putting Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility into Excel back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, this was a much smaller task than replicating Excel would be today. Lotus 1-2-3 was a much less complex product. Most people were upgrading from 1-2-3 v2.x to Excel, which meant that Excel really only had to be compatible with a product that was originally hand-written in x86 assembly.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#199

Post by pmelendez »

DanBC wrote: post #184
kijin wrote: post #77

> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use. Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b)…

> Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, sing…

>"That's Abiword. A much smaller and cheaper piece of software. That is all that most office workers need. So why is Office, a huge piece of software the default?"

Abiword's grammar checker is not nearly as good as Word's. That is specially in non-english laguanges. Also I would add to that list all the templates and design that Word brings out-of-box.

I am a weird case because I use Abiword at work and Office at home. And at least for short documents (10 pages max.) the experience on Word is just more enjoyable to me.

Re: Why Microsoft Word must die

#200

Post by oblio »

Nux wrote: post #85
sliverstorm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook may not be irreplaceable , but from what I've seen nobody has come close to making its replacement.

Once dead, Outlook should stay dead. It's absolutely horrible. Exchange as well.

I don't know your pet peeves with Outlook, but I've used Outlook 2007 and 2010 for 5 years now. Outside of an annoying "I've changed my AD password 2 weeks ago and you keep asking me for it" bug, Outlook is pretty solid.

And as one of the comments below said, try Lotus Notes for a while :o)

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