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I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional

I agree with you, playing devil's advocate though I would argue that Office largely won because it targeted casual usages even if it meant hurting professional ones. Then give it away to schools for $0 (in the 1990s) so they'd get a mass of beginner/casual users that brought it with them into professional settings. Word is awful at professional typesetting, but it is really easy to use casually for making resumes/letters/etc. Excel is excellent for making lists of things and basic accounting/graphing. Aside; the original Microsoft Office formats (e.g. doc) were formulated in C header files (i.e. a serialized array of C data types). They were garbage. Current Microsoft Office formats (ending in "x" e.g. docx) are night-and-day better (they're standard zip files with boring XML files within). People should go unzip a docx file and check it out, very not-intiminating.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
"(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)" that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.
thereddaikon 5y ago
Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office applications to their full extent. The people who can are using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent. But there are definitely people who are more adept with it in the business world. Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.
- baud147258 5y ago
  > Targeting casual use was the key. I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite
btilly 5y ago
Sorry, I have to give bonus points for, "their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems." The point where Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect was when Microsoft released Windows 95, which somehow broke WordPerfect, and refused to give Corel any access to it in advance of the release. By the time Corel had figured out how to make WordPerfect run 6 months later, it was too late, Microsoft Word was more widely used. Incidentally the original formats were literally a dump of in memory data structures. Which means that compatibility became a huge headache every time Microsoft tried to change its internal data structures. That's WHY they migrated to the docx format.
staticautomatic 5y ago
Have you ever read the documentation for that XML? It’s basically written in Zodiac cypher.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"(they're standard zip files with boring XML files within)" that's the container format. But the actual document data is still a big mess. Although that's probably unavoidable if you keep a file format for a long time. PDF and Photoshop files are also a mess.

thereddaikon 5y ago

Targeting casual use was the key. Even in the "professional" world almost nobody uses the Office applications to their full extent. The people who can are using more appropriate software. Accountants have Intuit and Peachtree, Anyone working in graphics, design or typesetting will use the appropriate Adobe app or competitor. Power Point is probably the only member of the suite that doesn't have a more "professional" equivalent. But there are definitely people who are more adept with it in the business world. Office was probably feature complete in its second or third iteration. The only substantive changes 99% of users notice are in interface overhauls.

baud147258 5y ago
> Targeting casual use was the key. I feel like that's what Google does with chromebooks and their editor suite

btilly 5y ago

Sorry, I have to give bonus points for, "their ceaseless effort to make competing software feel inferior on their operating systems." The point where Microsoft Word overtook WordPerfect was when Microsoft released Windows 95, which somehow broke WordPerfect, and refused to give Corel any access to it in advance of the release. By the time Corel had figured out how to make WordPerfect run 6 months later, it was too late, Microsoft Word was more widely used. Incidentally the original formats were literally a dump of in memory data structures. Which means that compatibility became a huge headache every time Microsoft tried to change its internal data structures. That's WHY they migrated to the docx format.

staticautomatic 5y ago

Have you ever read the documentation for that XML? It’s basically written in Zodiac cypher.