5 ms·

The reason .doc is ubiquitous is because, at one point, MS had the best product and it was adopted by the market. There was no coercion--it was a choice betwee

The reason .doc is ubiquitous is because, at one point, MS had the best product and it was adopted by the market. There was no coercion--it was a choice between MS Word or a vastly inferior product. Today, things are different. There are many wonderful office suites. But it's no good saying that we should restructure the pie as if office suites were new instead of old--Office is ahead because OO and iWork and whoever else were years late to the game. If they continue to be superior, they'll gain market share in spite of MS's best efforts.

davidw 18y ago
I'm not saying someone should step in and 'restructure' anything, just that there's cause for users to be a bit grumpy with the world because some markets are 'winner takes all'. > If they continue to be superior, they'll gain market share in spite of MS's best efforts. The point of big network externalities is that that doesn't necessarily happen. Qwerty and Betamax being cited (albeit disputed) examples - I'm sure there are other good ones.
bitdiddle 18y ago
.doc a best product. Sorry no way. Word to this day cannot produce anything near as good as Tex. I daily watch long email threads of collaborators struggling to share .doc files written with different versions of Word on different platforms.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  I think he meant Word was the best product. There are, of course, very many different reasons why one might use the word "best", but I would say that there are definitely many reasons why one would call .doc the best format.
- evgen 18y ago
  TeX may have had superior output, but its input methods have always sucked. At the period of time when word came to dominate there were no wysiwyg TeX tools and it was a real pain to include figures and images. Output formatting mattered if you were submitting a conference paper, but the other 99.999% of the population cared more about being able to get simple tasks done easily.
  - bitdiddle 18y ago
    perhaps, one builds up a set of neat macros and using emacs it's quite workable. For mathematics, Word still can't touch it. Word is also all about constantly needing the next $500 version. It's not clear also that they ever got this wysiwyg thing correct. It seems to change the fonts all the time in arbitrary ways. Sorry, I'd rather memorize a bunch of tags and use emacs.

davidw 18y ago

I'm not saying someone should step in and 'restructure' anything, just that there's cause for users to be a bit grumpy with the world because some markets are 'winner takes all'. > If they continue to be superior, they'll gain market share in spite of MS's best efforts. The point of big network externalities is that that doesn't necessarily happen. Qwerty and Betamax being cited (albeit disputed) examples - I'm sure there are other good ones.

bitdiddle 18y ago

.doc a best product. Sorry no way. Word to this day cannot produce anything near as good as Tex. I daily watch long email threads of collaborators struggling to share .doc files written with different versions of Word on different platforms.

mattmaroon 18y ago
I think he meant Word was the best product. There are, of course, very many different reasons why one might use the word "best", but I would say that there are definitely many reasons why one would call .doc the best format.
evgen 18y ago
TeX may have had superior output, but its input methods have always sucked. At the period of time when word came to dominate there were no wysiwyg TeX tools and it was a real pain to include figures and images. Output formatting mattered if you were submitting a conference paper, but the other 99.999% of the population cared more about being able to get simple tasks done easily.
- bitdiddle 18y ago
  perhaps, one builds up a set of neat macros and using emacs it's quite workable. For mathematics, Word still can't touch it. Word is also all about constantly needing the next $500 version. It's not clear also that they ever got this wysiwyg thing correct. It seems to change the fonts all the time in arbitrary ways. Sorry, I'd rather memorize a bunch of tags and use emacs.