33 ms·

Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software (and then porting it to the cloud) with an EU startup.

by bnt 5y ago

pajko 5y ago
https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/
dagw 5y ago
SoftMaker is a German company that has been developing and selling office software 30+ years.
mschuster91 5y ago
We could simply pool a bunch of money together to invest in development of Jitsi and OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Especially the latter desperately need it. The problem is, our politicians are either bought-off, digitally incompetent or irrelevant (sorry, Die PARTEI and Pirates, you're good but you're too small).
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
If you've ever used the online Office365 then you know that Microsoft's experience in writing desktop office software didn't transfer to the cloud offering at all. (Online Office is horrible in every way and isn't even compatible with desktop Office.) So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Can it be worse than offline MS Office? I've never used O365 and got initially acquainted with MS Office on some version of Winword before going deep on O'97, but whatever I use now feels full of limiting UI quirks that were tolerable twenty years ago but feel outrageously cumbersome looking at them from the present day. Combined with the sedimental layers of crustified superficial UI "reinventions" of several generations of product managers trying to leave their mark that eventually burden every Microsoft product. It's hardly surprising that fresh approaches like Google's offerings seem to eat MSOffice's lunch without even seriously trying.
larodi 5y ago
yeah, good luck with all the help&documentation available, KB system, rich features, and least but not last - integration with all other services and components. its wishful thinking or marketing to imagine that LibreOffice is anywhere near this... or Google Docs. For trivial documents - fine - any processor can do some work. For serious work - MS Office and most likely the desktop version of the app. And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.
- Sanguinaire 5y ago
  I agree that LibreOffice is basically a non-starter in this competition, but I also think you are over-selling the MS support experience - most of the information online to help with Word/Excel is rudimentary garbage cluttering up the search space. We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back. Is that really so much to ask?...
  - sharikone 5y ago
    > Is that really so much to ask?... Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure. I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.
    - Sanguinaire 5y ago
      (I know, I was being sarcastic. Wondered if the ... would be semantically similar enough to /s to convey that, but clearly not.)
      - yodon 5y ago
josefx 5y ago
Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software out of office365. I feel like I am missing half the features every time I use it and given that I barely go beyond drawing a few boxes with lines connecting them when it comes to power point I think that says something about how limited the experience is. Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement. That, and using an order of magnitude more hardware resources and leaking memory everywhere until your computer runs out of RAM. I have yet to find a browser which, with JavaScript enabled, will let me use it for more than a few hours without filling my RAM.
huibf 5y ago
Good luck finding competent developers and paying them European salaries. Most of these companies hire mediocre developers in small numbers because of budget constraints and then work on their product on borrowed time until the EU seed money runs out.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that European developers are not competent? Because most of us work for European salaries.
  - huibf 5y ago
    I am saying, not suggesting, that developers who accept to work for a much lower salary will naturally be, in average, less competent than those who know their worth.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      That's a stupid argument. EU-based developers usually get paid EU-level salaries ( so higher than the median EU salaries). Some work at American companies' EU-based offices, for slightly better salaries ( sometimes), but things remain in the same ballpark. Not everyone desires to move to the US to get a Silicon Valley-level salary and sacrifice their Quality of Life for it.
      - halo37253 5y ago
        What's wrong with getting paid more while being able to live in a place with large homes with large yards and wide road ways... Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years. And that isn't even the best paying trade job. An experienced Programmer easily can get a job making 120k+, and that isn't even in the valley. That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road. But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids. Along with that you have idiots that think trump was the second coming of jesus. And do nothing more than cry about thing that will only hurt them in the long run.
Woodi 5y ago
You are 100% +1 right with scope evaluation ! Still, as all -1 Earth goverments was doing nothing in last 40 years, it is now time to start ! Let it take 20 - 30 years - so what ? Ok, -2 - China tried to create Windows clone from scratch and failed. Instead MS wrote them social-spying-for-credit system... Why I say it's govs work and not some company or "startup" LOL ? Becouse of scope or more precise: users expectations. In that last 40 years just Sun tried to do something sensible and we own them a lot. So plan should be: - build on package installable on premise - many implementations - even few per nations - will not be a mistake. We have open formats in that century... - client-server model, with server running on host or somewhere on LAN / VPN - security included from day one, not "to be added later" - drop http and browsers and rebuild this part, too much bullshit accumulated. After all it's just protocol stack. And we have 30 years long timeframe for it ! Browsers are too stagnated. - do not include in planning stage peoples involved in "cookie consent" massacre... Looks like listening to American corporations ends like this. Tell them what to do and they will possibly do the best. - assign funds NOW for next 50 years of incremental development - make own CPUs, each nation / big company own. And build C compiler for that CPU. Make sure Linux or Minix work on it Yes, somehow Americans are best with building many things but instantly as they got total control they mess it up. And then keep messing it more ! So let build things, make new good standards and then let Americans join ! :)
raxxorrax 5y ago
Because the usual office clerk needs office software that runs in the cloud? I don't think so. It is completely sensible to use open source alternatives. China created their own government Linux distribution. Every country should do exactly that. They should adapt the sensible stuff, the innovation from China. Not the totalitarian crap like mass surveillance. But that is a feature set I expect to see in MS products in the future. This is an automatism for the company by now.

Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software (and then porting it to the cloud) with an EU startup.

by bnt 5y ago

Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software (and then porting it to the cloud) with an EU startup.

pajko 5y ago

https://www.onlyoffice.com/ https://www.onlyoffice.com/

dagw 5y ago

SoftMaker is a German company that has been developing and selling office software 30+ years.

mschuster91 5y ago

We could simply pool a bunch of money together to invest in development of Jitsi and OpenOffice/LibreOffice. Especially the latter desperately need it. The problem is, our politicians are either bought-off, digitally incompetent or irrelevant (sorry, Die PARTEI and Pirates, you're good but you're too small).

otabdeveloper4 5y ago

If you've ever used the online Office365 then you know that Microsoft's experience in writing desktop office software didn't transfer to the cloud offering at all. (Online Office is horrible in every way and isn't even compatible with desktop Office.) So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.

usrusr 5y ago
Can it be worse than offline MS Office? I've never used O365 and got initially acquainted with MS Office on some version of Winword before going deep on O'97, but whatever I use now feels full of limiting UI quirks that were tolerable twenty years ago but feel outrageously cumbersome looking at them from the present day. Combined with the sedimental layers of crustified superficial UI "reinventions" of several generations of product managers trying to leave their mark that eventually burden every Microsoft product. It's hardly surprising that fresh approaches like Google's offerings seem to eat MSOffice's lunch without even seriously trying.

larodi 5y ago

yeah, good luck with all the help&documentation available, KB system, rich features, and least but not last - integration with all other services and components. its wishful thinking or marketing to imagine that LibreOffice is anywhere near this... or Google Docs. For trivial documents - fine - any processor can do some work. For serious work - MS Office and most likely the desktop version of the app. And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.

Sanguinaire 5y ago
I agree that LibreOffice is basically a non-starter in this competition, but I also think you are over-selling the MS support experience - most of the information online to help with Word/Excel is rudimentary garbage cluttering up the search space. We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back. Is that really so much to ask?...
- sharikone 5y ago
  > Is that really so much to ask?... Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure. I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.
  - Sanguinaire 5y ago
    (I know, I was being sarcastic. Wondered if the ... would be semantically similar enough to /s to convey that, but clearly not.)
    - yodon 5y ago

josefx 5y ago

Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software out of office365. I feel like I am missing half the features every time I use it and given that I barely go beyond drawing a few boxes with lines connecting them when it comes to power point I think that says something about how limited the experience is. Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.

southerntofu 5y ago
> Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement. That, and using an order of magnitude more hardware resources and leaking memory everywhere until your computer runs out of RAM. I have yet to find a browser which, with JavaScript enabled, will let me use it for more than a few hours without filling my RAM.

huibf 5y ago

Good luck finding competent developers and paying them European salaries. Most of these companies hire mediocre developers in small numbers because of budget constraints and then work on their product on borrowed time until the EU seed money runs out.

nicoburns 5y ago
Are you suggesting that European developers are not competent? Because most of us work for European salaries.
- huibf 5y ago
  I am saying, not suggesting, that developers who accept to work for a much lower salary will naturally be, in average, less competent than those who know their worth.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    That's a stupid argument. EU-based developers usually get paid EU-level salaries ( so higher than the median EU salaries). Some work at American companies' EU-based offices, for slightly better salaries ( sometimes), but things remain in the same ballpark. Not everyone desires to move to the US to get a Silicon Valley-level salary and sacrifice their Quality of Life for it.
    - halo37253 5y ago
      What's wrong with getting paid more while being able to live in a place with large homes with large yards and wide road ways... Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years. And that isn't even the best paying trade job. An experienced Programmer easily can get a job making 120k+, and that isn't even in the valley. That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road. But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids. Along with that you have idiots that think trump was the second coming of jesus. And do nothing more than cry about thing that will only hurt them in the long run.

Woodi 5y ago

You are 100% +1 right with scope evaluation ! Still, as all -1 Earth goverments was doing nothing in last 40 years, it is now time to start ! Let it take 20 - 30 years - so what ? Ok, -2 - China tried to create Windows clone from scratch and failed. Instead MS wrote them social-spying-for-credit system... Why I say it's govs work and not some company or "startup" LOL ? Becouse of scope or more precise: users expectations. In that last 40 years just Sun tried to do something sensible and we own them a lot. So plan should be: - build on package installable on premise - many implementations - even few per nations - will not be a mistake. We have open formats in that century... - client-server model, with server running on host or somewhere on LAN / VPN - security included from day one, not "to be added later" - drop http and browsers and rebuild this part, too much bullshit accumulated. After all it's just protocol stack. And we have 30 years long timeframe for it ! Browsers are too stagnated. - do not include in planning stage peoples involved in "cookie consent" massacre... Looks like listening to American corporations ends like this. Tell them what to do and they will possibly do the best. - assign funds NOW for next 50 years of incremental development - make own CPUs, each nation / big company own. And build C compiler for that CPU. Make sure Linux or Minix work on it Yes, somehow Americans are best with building many things but instantly as they got total control they mess it up. And then keep messing it more ! So let build things, make new good standards and then let Americans join ! :)

raxxorrax 5y ago

Because the usual office clerk needs office software that runs in the cloud? I don't think so. It is completely sensible to use open source alternatives. China created their own government Linux distribution. Every country should do exactly that. They should adapt the sensible stuff, the innovation from China. Not the totalitarian crap like mass surveillance. But that is a feature set I expect to see in MS products in the future. This is an automatism for the company by now.