3 ms·
>Office suites are hardly important any more A solid majority of the people on the day side of the planet who are looking at a computer right now are looking a
by stevetrewick 11y ago
>Office suites are hardly important any more
A solid majority of the people on the day side of the planet who are looking at a computer right now are looking at an Excel or Word document.
MS Office has 1.2 billion users [0] (and that probably doesn't include unlicensed users). That's pretty important.
[0] http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/planet-office http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/planet-office
- TheRealDunkirk 11y agoWell, maybe I'm taking a longer view than that. You know what those 1.2B people staring at Word and Excel are USING them for? Ad-hoc content management systems and data query systems, which they, then, store in Windows file systems, and send to everyone and their brother all over the company in email, duplicating the storage. They're using those applications because no one has come along to write a dead-simple web app to automate what they're using them for, and make it much easier to work with and share the data. Over half of my 25-year career has been involved with making applications to actually address the business need that people were working AROUND with Word and Excel. I can't complain; it's been a pretty good deal. I'm doing 2 side projects to replace Excel sheets with Rails apps right now. But with more and more "apps" on smartphones and web sites, on the low end, and gargantuan cloud apps like Evernote and Google apps, this space is going to continue to shrink. The thing that probably won't die is friggin' PowerPoint. If I had a nickel for every slide I've had to look at...