The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by int_19h » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

jdblair wrote: post #26

tonysdg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This is especially noteworthy because the older Word formats were essentially memory dumps of the data structures used to store the document.

The binary formats that immediately preceded the current OOXML were OLE compound files (aka "structured storage), which is basically a filesystem-in-a-file that's intended to be used for serialization purposes - to allow files to have arbitrary nesting of COM components.

Individual data structures are then binary-serialized into that compound file, but I don't think it's accurate to call it a "memory dump". People often get that impression after looking at the compound file and seeing garbage there, much like unused blocks in memory - but that's because it's a filesystem, and as such, has a concept of unused "sectors". This is also why a freshly saved binary Word file might still contain bits and pieces of old data and metadata.

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

#32

Post by SllX » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 7:42 AM UTC

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?

1. Your CS professor does not sound very good at his job judging purely from the very tiny amount of information you have shared. I am sorry you have to deal with that.

2. I, at no point, stated or even implied that Word needs to die. I am largely indifferent towards Word. It is a piece of infrastructure that other people rely on, and as such, it will continue to have a place on the market. My point is that it was Infrastructure at all, not to criticize others for using it, or Microsoft for continuing to develop it, or the Office team for their work on it. This is true for many projects, and overall there seems to be a type of software which becomes infrastructure and will never be replaced even when software critics believe it should be replaced.

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

#33

Post by why_only_15 » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 7:51 AM UTC

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.

you shouldn't discount the power of the second one

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

#34

Post by briandear » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 7:54 AM UTC

hnzix wrote: post #30

elithrar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it’d be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did? It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are great .

Evernote started the trend but Microsoft destroyed them in the same way they killed Netscape; OneNote is free beer and it's deeply integrated with the Office suite. I can scan a whiteboard using MS Lens on my phone and it's instantly available on my laptop in OneNote. Oh and I don't have to convince the SOE nazis to allow install.

I can do the same thing with Apple Notes. And I don’t have to pay Microsoft anything. And it’s all available to iWork. Notes even has document scanning.

With Continuity Camera in Mojave, I can take a photo from my iPhone and instantly place it within a Pages document.

For power Excel users, Numbers isn’t yet a replacement, but for everything else, the stuff that is built in to MacOS works great and is free while working seamlessly across all Apple devices. I don’t work with massive spreadsheets nor use pivot tables so for me, iWork + Notes solves office productivity pretty darned well, plus Keynote puts PowerPoint to shame.

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

#35

Post by arkh » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:13 AM UTC

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…

Not even inside the cells. Excel column / rows filters. Hard to do better than those. I wish a lot more apps with data implemented something half as good.

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

#36

Post by rococode » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:18 AM UTC

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?

The entire 2013 Microsoft Office suite clocked in at ~45m lines of code, so Word is not even close to some of the really large programs considering Office also includes Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. [1] While we're on the subject, the biggest issue I personally have with Word is formatting, specifically dealing with images, tables, and padding. I feel that it's pretty satisfactory for day-to-day tasks, though.

[1] https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-li...

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

#37

Post by gnicholas » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:44 AM UTC

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?

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

#38

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:46 AM UTC

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…

> 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

WRT. Emacs/vim vs. VSCode/Atom, I can only say that we may know how to build better bridges than in the past, but for some reason we opt not to. It's like the goal of new software is everything except empowering users. Optimizing for ease of onboarding, for looks, for extracting value from users via business model trickery, etc. But not for utility.

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

#39

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:48 AM UTC

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.

What files?

When talking about SaaS (or more accurately, SaaSS[0]), you can "share" stuff between devices and people, but you don't control the data. You don't get a self-contained file that you can store and use independent of the service.

Just that is enough for me to prefer Word or OpenOffice whenever I can (and really, I just use Org Mode whenever I can get away with it).

--

[0] - Service as a Software Substitute. See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s....

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

#40

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Dec 05, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

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?

Personally, I like Word, because it has a particular niche - fast WYSIWYG use and mid-sized documents. That is, I can quickly make the exact nice-looking document I need, and print it. Without clunky UX (of Open/LibreOffice), and without it choking on mid-sized documents that's characteristic of GSuite and friends.