4 ms·

A web grandmaster see I. Office365/GoogleDocs should be very interested in this stuff and by "very" I mean 50 millions at least (they burn way more money on com

by fg6hr 7y ago

A web grandmaster see I. Office365/GoogleDocs should be very interested in this stuff and by "very" I mean 50 millions at least (they burn way more money on complete bs projects). It's very likely that the author knows more than I do, but it seems reasonable to work out some sort of dual-licensing deal: one for corps who want to take it and develop further and one for smaller businesses who are ok with saas-ish solution.

throwGuardian 7y ago
I'm a big fan of LaTex, having used it for my thesis, presentation (beamer) and a few peer reviewed articles/jounals. With that disclaimer I can safely contend that Google/MSFT will not be interested in this. LaTex is for academic typesetting, with a special focus on math-y content. Even with WYSIWYG, every now and then one will need to get into the weeds of Tex syntax, which is simply not for the average computer user. As for academia, they will not pay a Google/Microsoft for LaTex use when they might as well use Lyx/Kile or their favorite editor with some syntax highlighting support for Tex. And unlike regular note taking, academic writing isn't so spontaneous that you start editing your IEEE manuscript on the pot, while on your phone. My guess is that the FAANG tribe have little incentive to commercialize this, and hence acquire it
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  It would be a way to get all the techy academics onto some platform such as Office365. Once they are there they might start using other (paid) things on there.
- orhanhh 7y ago
  Have you checked out Overleaf? I would say they are proof that there is definitely a market. My university (40k students, 8k employees) has a deal with them where all students and employees get access to premium features, and they probably pay a decent chunk of money for that. They have published a list of institutions using Overleaf here: https://www.overleaf.com/for/universities https://www.overleaf.com/for/universities
- dsqrt 7y ago
  Single academics will likely not bother with Office365/Google, but University administrators are the ones buying enterprise software. In the past few years the trend has been for the central administration to push departments to give up their self-hosted mail servers and switch to Office365 (I have witnessed this at three different Universities). My guess is that something like SwiftLatex could sweeten the deal and convince the faculty to support some of these changes.
cm2187 7y ago
I agree, word and powerpoint would gain a lot from having a side by side markup/WYSIWYG experience. My definition of good is the visual studio wpf editor where you can entirely live in markup or UI or do both at the same time. But the reality is that outside of making office run on other platforms, there has been near zero innovation from Microsoft.

by fg6hr 7y ago

throwGuardian 7y ago

I'm a big fan of LaTex, having used it for my thesis, presentation (beamer) and a few peer reviewed articles/jounals. With that disclaimer I can safely contend that Google/MSFT will not be interested in this. LaTex is for academic typesetting, with a special focus on math-y content. Even with WYSIWYG, every now and then one will need to get into the weeds of Tex syntax, which is simply not for the average computer user. As for academia, they will not pay a Google/Microsoft for LaTex use when they might as well use Lyx/Kile or their favorite editor with some syntax highlighting support for Tex. And unlike regular note taking, academic writing isn't so spontaneous that you start editing your IEEE manuscript on the pot, while on your phone. My guess is that the FAANG tribe have little incentive to commercialize this, and hence acquire it

Double_a_92 7y ago
It would be a way to get all the techy academics onto some platform such as Office365. Once they are there they might start using other (paid) things on there.
orhanhh 7y ago
Have you checked out Overleaf? I would say they are proof that there is definitely a market. My university (40k students, 8k employees) has a deal with them where all students and employees get access to premium features, and they probably pay a decent chunk of money for that. They have published a list of institutions using Overleaf here: https://www.overleaf.com/for/universities https://www.overleaf.com/for/universities
dsqrt 7y ago
Single academics will likely not bother with Office365/Google, but University administrators are the ones buying enterprise software. In the past few years the trend has been for the central administration to push departments to give up their self-hosted mail servers and switch to Office365 (I have witnessed this at three different Universities). My guess is that something like SwiftLatex could sweeten the deal and convince the faculty to support some of these changes.

cm2187 7y ago

I agree, word and powerpoint would gain a lot from having a side by side markup/WYSIWYG experience. My definition of good is the visual studio wpf editor where you can entirely live in markup or UI or do both at the same time. But the reality is that outside of making office run on other platforms, there has been near zero innovation from Microsoft.