4 ms·

yeah, good luck with all the help&documentation available, KB system, rich features, and least but not last - integration with all other services and component

by 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
      You may find it helpful to read up on Poe's law [0]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
southerntofu 5y ago
> And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not. Which is one reason we don't need Microsoft's Office365 offer at all? I mean, especially in the case of big governments/orgs where they operate an entire fleet of machines, providing good desktop software would be a much better experience than crappy webapps. Unless of course the goal is real-time collaboration, in which case that's an entirely different use-case and i have no idea how google/microsoft tools fare in this space (but Hedgedoc/Cryptpad are solid).
- larodi 5y ago
  IMHO your statement holds good ground. perhaps not so many people need web version. still - OFfice365 is about integration with Azure, not only the web client, which... eventually will be replaced from its current from with something that builds on top of wasm/canvas (bet 5$ on it). The real-time collaboration is vastly overrated mostly, and thanks to Google's marketing. How many times have anyone had to do a real-time edit of document. How many times it was crucial for the process. And how is this better than git push/pulls? Well, there are some 5% of all cases where real-time collaboration on a document is good to have, but 95% of all times is reasonably OK to share a screen and have few people stand right by the side of s.o. performing actions.

by larodi 5y ago

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
    You may find it helpful to read up on Poe's law [0]. [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

southerntofu 5y ago

> And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not. Which is one reason we don't need Microsoft's Office365 offer at all? I mean, especially in the case of big governments/orgs where they operate an entire fleet of machines, providing good desktop software would be a much better experience than crappy webapps. Unless of course the goal is real-time collaboration, in which case that's an entirely different use-case and i have no idea how google/microsoft tools fare in this space (but Hedgedoc/Cryptpad are solid).

larodi 5y ago
IMHO your statement holds good ground. perhaps not so many people need web version. still - OFfice365 is about integration with Azure, not only the web client, which... eventually will be replaced from its current from with something that builds on top of wasm/canvas (bet 5$ on it). The real-time collaboration is vastly overrated mostly, and thanks to Google's marketing. How many times have anyone had to do a real-time edit of document. How many times it was crucial for the process. And how is this better than git push/pulls? Well, there are some 5% of all cases where real-time collaboration on a document is good to have, but 95% of all times is reasonably OK to share a screen and have few people stand right by the side of s.o. performing actions.