I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else who is fan.
Why Microsoft Word must die
31–40 of 387 posts
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#32Earlier 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.
$100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
In the US. You can find developers, good developers, for cheaper than that outside of major metro areas in the US, Europe, etc.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#33I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.
I agree with you - cart before the horse. If there were a good standard document format vendors would agree to support - rather than the weak default of bolt on plugins that can import and export other formats, presumably there would be an open field to experiment.
Since Office and Windows are Microsoft's furnace products there's no way I can see it happening.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#34The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
How many other software products have entire groups and conferences dedicated to tracking and mitigating the problems they cause? http://www.eusprig.org/
Linux? (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/) EDA tools? (http://www.dac.com/)
Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.
P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#35The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
Outlook may not be irreplaceable, but from what I've seen nobody has come close to making its replacement.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
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Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
$100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
In the US. You can find developers, good developers, for cheaper than that outside of major metro areas in the US, Europe, etc.
Little factors of 2-3x are not the issue here. It's the ten years with a thousand developers that really drive the cost.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#38> But somehow, the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems.
Is this actually true?
I accidentally checked just a few days ago, and amazon's self publishing platform allows using a simple html file.
Also I clearly remember that D. Hofstadter's books were typeset with latex, and at least in my country they are published by one of the biggest publishing companies.
So, maybe the stranglehold isn't so tight?
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#39Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst. They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics typeset using Word and MathType.
They seem like a step up from paper to me. You can still convert them to paper, do not need to drive to the DMV to get them, and have the option of filling them in with the keyboard if your handwriting is terrible (like me).
Are they a dream borne from an angel? No. Are they better? I think so.
Re: Why Microsoft Word must die
#40The truly irreplaceable product is Excel. It is fraught with quirky bugs and limitations and odd conventions (how many people actually end up storing dates before the magic February 29 1900?), yet no alternative can hold a candle to Excel. On the other hand, there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite
Outlook may not be irreplaceable , but from what I've seen nobody has come close to making its replacement.
It's really difficult to say whether the replacement for outlook will be a piece of software for the desktop, a web-based solution a la gmail/google calendar, or a powerful iPhone/android/bb app