10 ms·

I remember Joel himself mentioning in some article about how Excel suddenly became dominant over a competitor (Lotus spreadsheets I think) because you could not

I remember Joel himself mentioning in some article about how Excel suddenly became dominant over a competitor (Lotus spreadsheets I think) because you could not only open Lotus files in Excel, but you could also save the Excel back into Lotus format (two way compatibility). I am supposing this is because Lotus file format was not complete crap. If that is true, then isn't it also very possible that MS had an incentive to keep building on top of its cruddy file format without rethinking the design at any point? Isn't it true that even today, there is no viable competitor to MS Office even on non-Windows OS because MS has made file format compatibility extremely difficult? I am very glad that the latest and greatest features of Office automation after (and including) Office 2007 were mostly still-born and we could stop worrying about this issue and use MS Office as a tool and not as a "platform". It became too unwieldy even for hardcore MS supporters, and even though no good alternatives emerged, people generally decided that the programmability of MS Office had reached its limits - and moved away to other things like replacing them with browser based apps [1] I remember creating an Infopath "app" as a contractor around 2010, and wondering "what is this crap? Have these people never seen browser based apps?" [1] This is probably a sweeping statement. I would love to hear from someone who is certain that Office automation was a superior technology for a particular use case.

jcoffland 10y ago
> Isn't it true that even today, there is no viable competitor to MS Office even on non-Windows OS I'm not sure what you mean by a viable competitor but LibreOffice works very well for my needs and it runs on Windows, OSX and Linux. It also does a sufficient job of reading and writing MS file formats. For that matter, Google Docs is a pretty good competitor as well. I think a lot of people have come to accept MS dominance as a given and then put their heads in the sand. It's quite easy to get along just fine in business these days without Microsoft or Apple for that matter.
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  Try opening a large CSV file in Excel, GDocs, LibreOffice. GDocs dies around 50k rows, LO around a few 100k, Excel can cope with a million easily. And yes, this is normal use, I don't want to use a database for doing a job that's 2 mins in Excel. We use GDocs at the company, but it's a toy (a nice toy though).
  - paldepind2 10y ago
    Have you tried Gnumeric? It's supposed to be fast at handling large files.
    - aw3c2 10y ago
      It is! Just imported a 3 million line csv with zero problems.
  - neverminder 10y ago
    Indeed Libreoffice cannot handle large CSVs which is a shame, because otherwise it's an excellent tool.
  - merb 10y ago
    Basically thats a lie. Yes Office is good in many ways and especially ease of use. But opening a CSV file in Office > 2013 vs LibreOffice that contains more than 100k is ways more smooth in the newer LibreOffice version than in newer Office versions. If you would've written anything about UX or usages or Format interoperbility, rendering their own format etc than yes Office is a clear winner, but when it comes to big files and their resource usage the newer office versions are just bad.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      And for many of my use cases (although not all) LO/OO was way ahead of Word at times (formatting using styles comes to mind as a place where I used to prefer old OO for years and I also think LO/OO is less prone to misread basically anything as an American formatted date.)
      - merb 10y ago
        Yeah if you have a document written in LO/OO, that's true however loading still some XLS files is just akward. I mean probably due to the spec and even microsoft sometimes had bugs in their program so that at some things the spec didn't helped. like some table bugs etc. But still I don't wanted to says XYZ is better overall or so. I just wanted to point out that resource usage and loading bigger files is definitly not the thing were office shines at least the newer versions and also don't expect office for mac to be good, it sucks.
- cm2187 10y ago
  For basic things yes. For more advanced features, I can't think of any competitor. As a result office has pretty much stopped evolving the last 10 years. The only thing they are working on is making it more cross platform / web friendly. But it's pretty much a dead ecosystem.
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > For basic things yes. For more advanced features, I can't think of any competitor. For features above the basic level, Microsoft Office is far from being an alternative as well. For example, try to reformat the figure numbering scheme, or add an appendix to an Microsoft Word document. Very basic stuff, and yet Microsoft Word fails to offer a sane option to do so. Microsoft's offerings are only perceived as being above adequate because people don't know better.
    - Roritharr 10y ago
      And what would be better?
      - ptaipale 10y ago
        On one front, LaTeX. On another, e.g. Framemaker. But as an overall documentation tool MS Word is hard to beat because you can still do most things, and it is ubiquitous. In my experience, the worst problems with Word come out of company templates. Plain Word out of the box causes less surprises.
        cm2187 10y ago
        Most of my troubles with word have to do with most of the properties of the items on the document being invisible. You are dealing with invisible page breaks, invisible margins, invisible objects, etc. What would be really powerfull is a dual markup/WYSIWYG UI, like WPF in visual studio. Editing xml attributes on a markup is way more efficient than trying to guess on what you clicked and then going to menus and nested sub menus. But typing raw xml is not fun, you want to be able to type in the document directly. And you don't want to expose the markup to unsophisticated users. The markup should be way more defensive than a text editor. It should not allow you to place a node where that type of node is illegal. It should make autocomplete adds the mandatory features when typing a new node (like the closing tag, the mandatory attributes, etc). Otherwise we will spend our time dealing with corrupted documents. Same for powerpoint, which in my opinion has pretty much converged with word. Most decks created are not on screen presentation but rather rich visual text documents, just text document with a page orientation that fits modern screens.
- newscracker 10y ago
  I like LibreOffice because it's FLOSS and supports Open Document (formats). I use Calc for several of my personal spreadsheets. However, I personally do not like a few things with LibreOffice, which I think help the notion among people that MS dominance is a given and that solutions like LibreOffice are not good enough: 1. It does not support MS Office keybindings and its menu structure by default (not referring to the ribbon interface here). That's not a great thing for an application that would like more people from the MS Office camp to use it. As someone who's used MS Excel for a long time and learned several keyboard shortcuts, I still take more time to accomplish even simple things in LibreOffice and am learning different keyboard shortcuts to use Calc. Ideally, it shouldn't be this way. I don't understand what LibreOffice gains by adopting different keyboard shortcuts. 2. The UI (icons, menu fonts, colors, etc.) looks primitive and needs a redesign to keep up with the times (I've mentioned this in some other comments on HN). 3. It lags behind in feature set and ease of use compared to MS Excel (as one example, try creating, editing and changing charts in both). This is not really as big a deal for most users compared to the two points above.
- wongarsu 10y ago
  > It also does a sufficient job of reading and writing MS file formats. Except for powerpoint presentations.
- ue_ 10y ago
  This may seem a minor gripe, but last time I used LibreOffice it didn't have a way to visually crop an image just like Word or Google Docs can, which is disappointing for the sort of work I do, especially as I'd like to only use Free Software to do it. It means I need to spend more time cropping the image in an external program, and I can't adjust the dimensions later. It's a hassle.
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Crop https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Crop
jimmaswell 10y ago
In the majority of cases, LibreOffice is a viable free replacement. There are onky a few missing features that you probably won't need. The onlu time that happened to me was trying to do a certain kind of regression curve that was only in Mictosoft Excel, for a physics class.
- gbog 10y ago
  I would really love to agree because I hate ms so much, but sadly it's false: every time I use libreoffice, it's because I need to open a doc or ppt sent to me, and the layout is messed it's barely readable
- blahi 10y ago
  If libre office/google docs fits your needs, you are artificially limiting your needs*. Probably not even realizing it. Unless what you do can be done with a calculator (barebones basic stuff).
  - sirtaj 10y ago
    This argument extends easily - you're artificially limiting your needs by using Office, when you could be using ScipPy/Jupyter/IPython/Pandas.
    - blahi 10y ago
      Spreadsheets serve different needs than the tools you mentioned.
      - sirtaj 10y ago
        What needs are those? Which ones can't be served by the tools I mentioned?
        blahi 10y ago
        Planning. Oftentimes all you need is to calculate some columns and play with numbers and see how the calculations change. The same things that make Excel bad for robust statistical modeling, make it good for all sorts of planning activities.
thr0waway1239 10y ago
The discussions about the suitability of Google Docs and LibreOffice makes me wonder - is there a benchmark website for file format compatibility verification? If not it may be a very useful to create one and just host it on, say, GitHub pages. We could upload complex, but reasonably common, documents in various file formats for corresponding softwares, and create easy to read checklists of the different failure modes when trying to open the file in a different software from one in which it was authored.
blihp 10y ago
It's not that the file format was any better, it was just much simpler because in the DOS days you couldn't arbitrarily embed content from one application into another. Lotus' file format was just as proprietary as Microsoft's was. However, Excel had very good file importers, but also things like keystroke migration wizards etc. Microsoft invested a lot of time and money into doing everything they could to lower the transition barriers into Excel specifically for Lotus users. (and Office apps in general. They had similar efforts for WordPerfect->MS Word migration and others) It was a fairly one-way trip in that even in the first versions of Excel, getting data back out was never as easy as getting it in was (i.e. the exporters weren't as complete as the importers... probably by design) and throughout the 90's Microsoft definitely built on and expanded the one-way nature of migration to their proprietary file formats as a key to lock-in. It wasn't so much that it was all that difficult as it was undocumented and always changing (there were multiple backwards incompatible file formats in each of the main MS Office apps in the 1990's). So if you were a customer or competitor, it wasn't so much that you couldn't reverse engineer the file format, it's that they were relatively undocumented and constantly changing so by the time you had done it, they were on to the next revision. I think it was a couple of years after the DoJ case, and a result of the settlement terms, that things really started improving on this front... but by then Microsoft had long since won. By that time most of their competitors had already figured out that the only way they could hope to compete with Microsoft was to bypass them entirely... hence the focus on web apps. You mention web apps so I'll close with this: unless you're taking great pains to only use the open and cross-platform standards for them, in the not too distant future you're likely to find yourself in the exact same spot with your web apps that people were with desktop apps not too long ago. Different platform, same game...
- thr0waway1239 10y ago
  So I guess we both agree that the resulting complexity of the file format itself had a lot to do with an intention of lock-in. Which directly contradicts Joel's first statement: "are deliberately obfuscated". :-) Also, regarding web apps, I like to think of it as the building, not of "perfect systems", but "self-correcting systems". The web, with all its chaos, it still more self-correcting than MS Office has been - in fact, even from your comment it does seem that the intention was only lock-in and not improvement of file formats (other than perhaps an improvement in MS bottom line). Oddly, even the benefits to the MS bottom line now seems more short sighted. E.g. the ongoing fiasco that is the Windows 10 auto-upgrade. [1] Someday I expect to read post-mortems on the failure of Windows 10's so called perpetual upgrade policy (i.e the notion that there will be no more version numbers after 10) which link the failure to their refusal to build self-correcting systems. [1] Personally, I don't think we have seen the worst of it just yet.
mike 10y ago
The post you're thinking of: Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back! http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

jcoffland 10y ago

> Isn't it true that even today, there is no viable competitor to MS Office even on non-Windows OS I'm not sure what you mean by a viable competitor but LibreOffice works very well for my needs and it runs on Windows, OSX and Linux. It also does a sufficient job of reading and writing MS file formats. For that matter, Google Docs is a pretty good competitor as well. I think a lot of people have come to accept MS dominance as a given and then put their heads in the sand. It's quite easy to get along just fine in business these days without Microsoft or Apple for that matter.

sz4kerto 10y ago
Try opening a large CSV file in Excel, GDocs, LibreOffice. GDocs dies around 50k rows, LO around a few 100k, Excel can cope with a million easily. And yes, this is normal use, I don't want to use a database for doing a job that's 2 mins in Excel. We use GDocs at the company, but it's a toy (a nice toy though).
- paldepind2 10y ago
  Have you tried Gnumeric? It's supposed to be fast at handling large files.
  - aw3c2 10y ago
    It is! Just imported a 3 million line csv with zero problems.
- neverminder 10y ago
  Indeed Libreoffice cannot handle large CSVs which is a shame, because otherwise it's an excellent tool.
- merb 10y ago
  Basically thats a lie. Yes Office is good in many ways and especially ease of use. But opening a CSV file in Office > 2013 vs LibreOffice that contains more than 100k is ways more smooth in the newer LibreOffice version than in newer Office versions. If you would've written anything about UX or usages or Format interoperbility, rendering their own format etc than yes Office is a clear winner, but when it comes to big files and their resource usage the newer office versions are just bad.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    And for many of my use cases (although not all) LO/OO was way ahead of Word at times (formatting using styles comes to mind as a place where I used to prefer old OO for years and I also think LO/OO is less prone to misread basically anything as an American formatted date.)
    - merb 10y ago
      Yeah if you have a document written in LO/OO, that's true however loading still some XLS files is just akward. I mean probably due to the spec and even microsoft sometimes had bugs in their program so that at some things the spec didn't helped. like some table bugs etc. But still I don't wanted to says XYZ is better overall or so. I just wanted to point out that resource usage and loading bigger files is definitly not the thing were office shines at least the newer versions and also don't expect office for mac to be good, it sucks.
cm2187 10y ago
For basic things yes. For more advanced features, I can't think of any competitor. As a result office has pretty much stopped evolving the last 10 years. The only thing they are working on is making it more cross platform / web friendly. But it's pretty much a dead ecosystem.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > For basic things yes. For more advanced features, I can't think of any competitor. For features above the basic level, Microsoft Office is far from being an alternative as well. For example, try to reformat the figure numbering scheme, or add an appendix to an Microsoft Word document. Very basic stuff, and yet Microsoft Word fails to offer a sane option to do so. Microsoft's offerings are only perceived as being above adequate because people don't know better.
  - Roritharr 10y ago
    And what would be better?
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      On one front, LaTeX. On another, e.g. Framemaker. But as an overall documentation tool MS Word is hard to beat because you can still do most things, and it is ubiquitous. In my experience, the worst problems with Word come out of company templates. Plain Word out of the box causes less surprises.
      - cm2187 10y ago
        Most of my troubles with word have to do with most of the properties of the items on the document being invisible. You are dealing with invisible page breaks, invisible margins, invisible objects, etc. What would be really powerfull is a dual markup/WYSIWYG UI, like WPF in visual studio. Editing xml attributes on a markup is way more efficient than trying to guess on what you clicked and then going to menus and nested sub menus. But typing raw xml is not fun, you want to be able to type in the document directly. And you don't want to expose the markup to unsophisticated users. The markup should be way more defensive than a text editor. It should not allow you to place a node where that type of node is illegal. It should make autocomplete adds the mandatory features when typing a new node (like the closing tag, the mandatory attributes, etc). Otherwise we will spend our time dealing with corrupted documents. Same for powerpoint, which in my opinion has pretty much converged with word. Most decks created are not on screen presentation but rather rich visual text documents, just text document with a page orientation that fits modern screens.
newscracker 10y ago
I like LibreOffice because it's FLOSS and supports Open Document (formats). I use Calc for several of my personal spreadsheets. However, I personally do not like a few things with LibreOffice, which I think help the notion among people that MS dominance is a given and that solutions like LibreOffice are not good enough: 1. It does not support MS Office keybindings and its menu structure by default (not referring to the ribbon interface here). That's not a great thing for an application that would like more people from the MS Office camp to use it. As someone who's used MS Excel for a long time and learned several keyboard shortcuts, I still take more time to accomplish even simple things in LibreOffice and am learning different keyboard shortcuts to use Calc. Ideally, it shouldn't be this way. I don't understand what LibreOffice gains by adopting different keyboard shortcuts. 2. The UI (icons, menu fonts, colors, etc.) looks primitive and needs a redesign to keep up with the times (I've mentioned this in some other comments on HN). 3. It lags behind in feature set and ease of use compared to MS Excel (as one example, try creating, editing and changing charts in both). This is not really as big a deal for most users compared to the two points above.
wongarsu 10y ago
> It also does a sufficient job of reading and writing MS file formats. Except for powerpoint presentations.
ue_ 10y ago
This may seem a minor gripe, but last time I used LibreOffice it didn't have a way to visually crop an image just like Word or Google Docs can, which is disappointing for the sort of work I do, especially as I'd like to only use Free Software to do it. It means I need to spend more time cropping the image in an external program, and I can't adjust the dimensions later. It's a hassle.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Crop https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Crop

jimmaswell 10y ago

In the majority of cases, LibreOffice is a viable free replacement. There are onky a few missing features that you probably won't need. The onlu time that happened to me was trying to do a certain kind of regression curve that was only in Mictosoft Excel, for a physics class.

gbog 10y ago
I would really love to agree because I hate ms so much, but sadly it's false: every time I use libreoffice, it's because I need to open a doc or ppt sent to me, and the layout is messed it's barely readable
blahi 10y ago
If libre office/google docs fits your needs, you are artificially limiting your needs*. Probably not even realizing it. Unless what you do can be done with a calculator (barebones basic stuff).
- sirtaj 10y ago
  This argument extends easily - you're artificially limiting your needs by using Office, when you could be using ScipPy/Jupyter/IPython/Pandas.
  - blahi 10y ago
    Spreadsheets serve different needs than the tools you mentioned.
    - sirtaj 10y ago
      What needs are those? Which ones can't be served by the tools I mentioned?
      - blahi 10y ago
        Planning. Oftentimes all you need is to calculate some columns and play with numbers and see how the calculations change. The same things that make Excel bad for robust statistical modeling, make it good for all sorts of planning activities.

thr0waway1239 10y ago

The discussions about the suitability of Google Docs and LibreOffice makes me wonder - is there a benchmark website for file format compatibility verification? If not it may be a very useful to create one and just host it on, say, GitHub pages. We could upload complex, but reasonably common, documents in various file formats for corresponding softwares, and create easy to read checklists of the different failure modes when trying to open the file in a different software from one in which it was authored.

blihp 10y ago

It's not that the file format was any better, it was just much simpler because in the DOS days you couldn't arbitrarily embed content from one application into another. Lotus' file format was just as proprietary as Microsoft's was. However, Excel had very good file importers, but also things like keystroke migration wizards etc. Microsoft invested a lot of time and money into doing everything they could to lower the transition barriers into Excel specifically for Lotus users. (and Office apps in general. They had similar efforts for WordPerfect->MS Word migration and others) It was a fairly one-way trip in that even in the first versions of Excel, getting data back out was never as easy as getting it in was (i.e. the exporters weren't as complete as the importers... probably by design) and throughout the 90's Microsoft definitely built on and expanded the one-way nature of migration to their proprietary file formats as a key to lock-in. It wasn't so much that it was all that difficult as it was undocumented and always changing (there were multiple backwards incompatible file formats in each of the main MS Office apps in the 1990's). So if you were a customer or competitor, it wasn't so much that you couldn't reverse engineer the file format, it's that they were relatively undocumented and constantly changing so by the time you had done it, they were on to the next revision. I think it was a couple of years after the DoJ case, and a result of the settlement terms, that things really started improving on this front... but by then Microsoft had long since won. By that time most of their competitors had already figured out that the only way they could hope to compete with Microsoft was to bypass them entirely... hence the focus on web apps. You mention web apps so I'll close with this: unless you're taking great pains to only use the open and cross-platform standards for them, in the not too distant future you're likely to find yourself in the exact same spot with your web apps that people were with desktop apps not too long ago. Different platform, same game...

thr0waway1239 10y ago
So I guess we both agree that the resulting complexity of the file format itself had a lot to do with an intention of lock-in. Which directly contradicts Joel's first statement: "are deliberately obfuscated". :-) Also, regarding web apps, I like to think of it as the building, not of "perfect systems", but "self-correcting systems". The web, with all its chaos, it still more self-correcting than MS Office has been - in fact, even from your comment it does seem that the intention was only lock-in and not improvement of file formats (other than perhaps an improvement in MS bottom line). Oddly, even the benefits to the MS bottom line now seems more short sighted. E.g. the ongoing fiasco that is the Windows 10 auto-upgrade. [1] Someday I expect to read post-mortems on the failure of Windows 10's so called perpetual upgrade policy (i.e the notion that there will be no more version numbers after 10) which link the failure to their refusal to build self-correcting systems. [1] Personally, I don't think we have seen the worst of it just yet.

mike 10y ago

The post you're thinking of: Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back! http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html