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I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry

I'm in the business of building an online word processor - https://www.zoho.com/writer https://www.zoho.com/writer It's interesting how the documents industry is moving from print oriented legacy softwares (Google Docs, Word) to block based, app-ish, smart canvases (Notion, Coda, etc). Also both Microsoft & Google have adopted completely different strategies to compete in this market. Microsoft launched Loop as an entirely new app while Google is incorporating these blocks as smart chips in Google Docs itself. Both strategies have their own pros and cons. My bet is on Google Docs style, because this means a group that's already invested in traditional document making skills (legal professionals, academic professionals, etc) will be able to incrementally step up their game without their workflow being completely destroyed. Sure, this will slow down the pace with which Google Docs can innovate and evolve - but overall it helps the older generation to smoothly transition over to the new age document editing, which is great.

k__ 5y ago
What's the benefit here? Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone. Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner. But it doesn't seem like a big change...
- JoBrad 5y ago
  Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?
- polote 5y ago
  It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc. So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me. How big a change was it to implement? I don't know. Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too. I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I didn't think about the costs of implementing it, but that it seems to be an discussion worthy topic here on HN. But I don't understand why.
- hadlock 5y ago
  The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google! So yeah, I welcome this change big time.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big issues with them.
punnerud 5y ago
Not from document to block, but from XML-based into database-based. Try to open a Word document with a zip program, all you will see is a lot of folders with XML and blob images. Latex and Word is XML. Notion is database. The benefit of database: History, scale better, multiple users, merge text as diff is simpler +++
- afandian 5y ago
  Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?
  - oreilles 5y ago
    XML is a document. A relational database is a relational database. Both can be used to create a tree structure. Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing tree traversal in both directions.
    - afandian 5y ago
      Once you're into a relational model you can start treating your forest of trees as a big graph if you want to (though you don't have to). And you can edit nodes individually without having to iterate the entire document. But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions? I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!
    - slightwinder 5y ago
      XMl is format, not a document. XML can be used to express whatever data structure you want. For the user it has little meaning whether the backend is using xml, json, a sql- or nosql-database. The interface and workflows are hiding it all away.
polote 5y ago
> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that. The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"
- asddubs 5y ago
  porn list?
  - xiaq 5y ago
    I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see meaning 3 and 4 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English. I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".
    - irrational 5y ago
      1. Pornhub 2. Uh…
    - asciii 5y ago
      Not OP, but thanks for clarifying. It's early this Friday morning and I was wondering why Notion worked well for "porn" lists.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
dpkrjb 5y ago
Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.
- lf-non 5y ago
  I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
  - wiredfool 5y ago
    I wish. One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web) PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
      - zerkten 5y ago
        Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper than Europe in 2000. It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
    - 5y ago
algo_trader 5y ago
Good luck with the whole zoho suite. We could all use some alternatives. Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made a real effort to compete with MS Office?
agumonkey 5y ago
Maybe Microsoft didn't like the results of the OLE era and decided embedding wouldn't work for enough users. It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??
matwood 5y ago
> legal professionals I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that use anything other than track changes in docx. :D
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I agree. I have over 50 US patents, and the multitude of patent lawyers I have worked with all use docs with change tracking enabled. EDIT: parents -> patents
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    >I have over 50 US parents I feel for you, my kids have two US parents and they find them to be quite the pain in the ass. :-)
    - mark_l_watson 5y ago
      :-)
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  Not to mention that having any kind of client-related document on an online service like Google that's indexing the content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-client privilege.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.
Angostura 5y ago
Loop is an interesting app, rendered entirely pointless for me by the fact that I cannot share it outside of my organisation :(
setgree 5y ago
Looks like a nice site! One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response
- polote 5y ago
  FYI Zoho it is not only a nice site, they have 12k employees (per Linkedin) :)
mwexler 5y ago
Just a vote for Zoho. It's a really impressive collection of integrated business tools. I keep discovering new things every time I check it out.
- adamfeldman 5y ago
  The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not worth it, as of late 2019. I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019. What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?
    - adamfeldman 5y ago
      My criticism is all the "business" apps – CRM and Desk were the central pieces. I haven't used the Mail app. My teams used Google Workspace for email etc.
AnonC 5y ago
A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pages don’t help me in this regard. I’m on mobile using Firefox Focus, if at all this happens to be a browser and/or ad blocker issue.
- aeyes 5y ago
  Because you have to buy one of their bundles to get this product, these are the ones I found: https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/ https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- lewisjoe 5y ago
  Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using. We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/ https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear at all. I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.
ryandrake 5y ago
I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.
- lewisjoe 5y ago
  I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting. My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.
  - jessriedel 5y ago
    But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.
    - ztravis 5y ago
      There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it). I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's probably the same way. That means there's no chance of "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format. At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.
      - 5y ago
freedomben 5y ago
Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable. No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer
asojfdowgh 5y ago
"Word" Except Word has had a pageless equivalent since Word 97, probably prior. It doesn't really feel that impressive or new age to include a basic and imo required feature from the competitor so very very late!
rkagerer 5y ago
<sigh> I guess I'm old fashioned but I really like being able to print things (even if sometimes not to real paper). eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation. Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers). Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape. And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain. Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.

k__ 5y ago

What's the benefit here? Seems like it's touted as an innovation, but the only thing I see is that page breaks are gone. Which isn't bad, I mostly use Google docs for online articles and to maintain a todo list, so things are now a bit cleaner. But it doesn't seem like a big change...

JoBrad 5y ago
Right? Isn’t this just the Web Layout view that MS Word has had forever?
polote 5y ago
It looks prettier, it allows you to put blocks bigger than the content. For example you can have the content to be fixed sized 800px and then inside the content put a large table or an image that is full width, and it can also feel like a static website. That what Notion does, you can "publish your page to the web" that gives a public URL that anyone can visit, without feeling like they are inside Notion
jrochkind1 5y ago
When creating docs only meant to be consumed online, the page breaks have gotten in my way before many times. Splitting up paragraphs because they don't fit on a page etc. So I can see this change having a big effect on consumers. If by "how big a change" you meant "would anyone even care", I think people will care, yes. Including me. How big a change was it to implement? I don't know. Note in addition to not having page breaks, it appears to have several "responsive" features added too (from the OP description, I haven't played with it yet myself). Lines wrap at whatever your screen size is (including zoom level), and there is apparently some screen-size-responsiveness to at least some images too. I couldn't say how difficult this was to implement, having no idea what the code is like, and knowing that large legacy codebases can make naive predictions of how difficult a given change might be unreliable.
- k__ 5y ago
  I didn't think about the costs of implementing it, but that it seems to be an discussion worthy topic here on HN. But I don't understand why.
hadlock 5y ago
The last time I printed something written on google docs was probably 2012 or so, a printed copy of my resume Limiting my docs to a IRL format doesn't make much sense to me, page breaks make no sense, with H1/H2/H3 etc you can just navigate the doc that way, and internal links work etc. No need to say "check out the flurple widget subsection on page 92" you just slack/email them the link to the subheader or H3 or whatever and bam they're there reading what you need them to look at, similar to markdown docs on github, but with all the manual formating GUI'd away.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
spookthesunset 5y ago
Our org does a lot through google docs. Every single doc I created I had to fight the stupid page breaks. Like, I was never gonna print the thing so knock it off, google! So yeah, I welcome this change big time.
- k__ 5y ago
  I didn't like the page breaks either, but I never had big issues with them.

punnerud 5y ago

Not from document to block, but from XML-based into database-based. Try to open a Word document with a zip program, all you will see is a lot of folders with XML and blob images. Latex and Word is XML. Notion is database. The benefit of database: History, scale better, multiple users, merge text as diff is simpler +++

afandian 5y ago
Surely once you've got a block inside a block you're back to the XML model again?
- oreilles 5y ago
  XML is a document. A relational database is a relational database. Both can be used to create a tree structure. Notion does it wit a "block" table, each block having a parent block id, and a list of child block ids, allowing tree traversal in both directions.
  - afandian 5y ago
    Once you're into a relational model you can start treating your forest of trees as a big graph if you want to (though you don't have to). And you can edit nodes individually without having to iterate the entire document. But assuming you're trying to maintain the tree structure you still have many of the same issues. Each node will need to entail the context of its parent, which means that you'll need to know things like transitive closures in order to know if a parent node affects a child (e.g. deletion) or if a child affects a parent (e.g. re-render tree). Or if you move a node do you have to re-create pointers below it? And tracking history could get complicated because it might span both the content of the node and the tree structure metadata (e.g. can you undo a change where the text was bold and a block was moved around). Where do you put transactions? I'm not saying this is the same as XML, just that you can't magically escape all of the downsides. It's a fun problem to solve!
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    XMl is format, not a document. XML can be used to express whatever data structure you want. For the user it has little meaning whether the backend is using xml, json, a sql- or nosql-database. The interface and workflows are hiding it all away.

polote 5y ago

> My bet is on Google Docs style, Also in the industry. My bet is on all of them. Some people prefer block based, some prefer text, some prefer Markdown, some don't care. Writing a book on Notion is impossible for now, but building beautiful pages is much easier in Notion. Microsoft and Google (And Atlassian) have all adopted the same strategy which is "Look more like Notion". I don't think that Microsoft should be worried about Notion. But things are different with Google Docs, which is really threaten by Notion. At the end of the day, most Google docs can be created in Notion without any difference, and I actually doubt Google docs will be able to evolve enough to prevent that. The strongest advantage of Notion compared to Google docs is not its text editor but it is his list feature. And there are a lot of list porn people. When you have 10% of your workforce being "hardcore list porn people" and 90% of the others being "dont care people". Then it makes sense that the full organization goes closer and closer to Notion EDIT: "porn list" -> "list porn"

asddubs 5y ago
porn list?
- xiaq 5y ago
  I think GP's "porn list people" means "people who really like lists (as if lists are pornography to them)"; see meaning 3 and 4 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/porn#English. I would say the other way around though, i.e. "list porn people".
  - irrational 5y ago
    1. Pornhub 2. Uh…
  - asciii 5y ago
    Not OP, but thanks for clarifying. It's early this Friday morning and I was wondering why Notion worked well for "porn" lists.
- vlovich123 5y ago

dpkrjb 5y ago

Have you ever tried to print a Notion document? It feels like they made the "Export to PDF" in a weekend. It's hugely underpowered and under-featured. It feels like Notion's demographic just dont need to share documents as documents. Notion would likely have put more effort into that feature if they did.

lf-non 5y ago
I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
- wiredfool 5y ago
  I wish. One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web) PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
    - zerkten 5y ago
      Have you been to Japan? Everything involves more paper than Europe in 2000. It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
  - 5y ago

algo_trader 5y ago

Good luck with the whole zoho suite. We could all use some alternatives. Is there some sort of consensus on why Google hasnt really made a real effort to compete with MS Office?

agumonkey 5y ago

Maybe Microsoft didn't like the results of the OLE era and decided embedding wouldn't work for enough users. It seems the "live recompute everything" ala Brett Victor (and previous) is spreading, do you agree ??

matwood 5y ago

> legal professionals I would love to meet these mythical legal professionals that use anything other than track changes in docx. :D

mark_l_watson 5y ago
I agree. I have over 50 US patents, and the multitude of patent lawyers I have worked with all use docs with change tracking enabled. EDIT: parents -> patents
- linsomniac 5y ago
  >I have over 50 US parents I feel for you, my kids have two US parents and they find them to be quite the pain in the ass. :-)
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    :-)
LordAtlas 5y ago
Not to mention that having any kind of client-related document on an online service like Google that's indexing the content (at the least) is probably a violation of attorney-client privilege.
mkr-hn 5y ago
Don't forget passing around Excel documents. I'm not a lawyer, but I've read accounts of this from enough to think it's a whole thing and not an isolated phenomenon.

Angostura 5y ago

Loop is an interesting app, rendered entirely pointless for me by the fact that I cannot share it outside of my organisation :(

setgree 5y ago

Looks like a nice site! One piece of UX/design feedback -- the red color on 'START WRITING" triggers an automatic response that I've done something wrong or that a site is trying to warn me about something. I don't think a lighter shade/different color would trigger the same response

polote 5y ago
FYI Zoho it is not only a nice site, they have 12k employees (per Linkedin) :)

mwexler 5y ago

Just a vote for Zoho. It's a really impressive collection of integrated business tools. I keep discovering new things every time I check it out.

adamfeldman 5y ago
The breadth of Zoho apps is incredible, the price is unbeatable, but the quality is bad enough to make it not worth it, as of late 2019. I implemented the full Zoho suite a couple times at different companies, in 2016 and 2018-2019. What hurt most are the endless papercuts on the core CRM tool. Ultimately the pains for my users weren't worth it.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Is your criticism limited to the CRM tool? I've had nothing but great things to say about Zoho, but I haven't used the CRM tool. Are your criticisms for Mail?
  - adamfeldman 5y ago
    My criticism is all the "business" apps – CRM and Desk were the central pieces. I haven't used the Mail app. My teams used Google Workspace for email etc.

AnonC 5y ago

A tangential question on Zoho Writer: why isn’t there any information on pricing (or a statement that it’s free)? I looked for pricing links. I even went to the resources page and searched for pricing and found no results. The very first thing I need to know when looking at an online platform is what kind of lock-in exists, how I can safely try it out and how much time I should invest in trying it out. The Writer pages don’t help me in this regard. I’m on mobile using Firefox Focus, if at all this happens to be a browser and/or ad blocker issue.

aeyes 5y ago
Because you have to buy one of their bundles to get this product, these are the ones I found: https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/ https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lewisjoe 5y ago
Hi, sorry about the confusion. We didn't have a pricing page because the app itself is free for individuals (along with a bunch of other editors as well for spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations). You can sign up with your email account right away and start using. We do have paid plans in case you need to onboard a team and want access to a bunch of other apps as well - https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/ https://www.zoho.com/in/workplace/
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  It's "free"... but as a SaaS office suite, the documents (along with any attached images, etc) are stored in the cloud. And if you're not paying for WorkDrive, then the storage limits (if any?) are not really documented or clear at all. I recently signed up for Zoho mail hosting, after Google announced the sunsetting for their legacy free customers. But the mail plans don't come with WorkDrive access. So even though I'm a paying customer to get IMAP access, I haven't really touched any of the Zoho office suite apps yet because I simply don't understand what my caps and limitations are.

ryandrake 5y ago

I just hope the industry doesn't "move on" from print-focused word processing and start treating it like a second class citizen. Some of us target actual print: Books, technical manuals, posters, pamphlets, brochures, etc. and Docs is still basically decent "poor man's desktop publishing". Trying to layout a document for print when you don't have WYSIWYG page boundaries is a nightmare.

lewisjoe 5y ago
I don't think we ever will or even should ditch paper formats. It will always have its place in legal or any other industry that relies on formal documenting. My selfish reason: take the most popular paper format - PDF. A PDF created thirty years ago, is viewable today and will be preserved intact and viewable thirty years from now. I won't be able to say the same about a Coda or Notion doc. With all that dynamic blocks pulling data from all over the internet, I don't even think it's possible.
- jessriedel 5y ago
  But you could have made a similar critique of PDF 30 years ago: it started as a proprietary format vastly more complicated and fragile than plain text documents. Plain text documents had existed for decades and would continue to exist. Nonetheless, the benefits of the then-new PDF format were so great that it was eventually standardized.
  - ztravis 5y ago
    There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it). I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's probably the same way. That means there's no chance of "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format. At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.
    - 5y ago

freedomben 5y ago

Thanks for your insights, that's really interesting. Also, if you are putting the same amount of attention to detail and focus on pragmatism over beauty that Zoho Mail uses, I think you'll kill it. I'm by no means dogging on Zoho Mail, I think it's good looking. But the reason I love it is that it's loaded with features/settings, and it's done in a way that is intuitive and highly usable. No connection to Zoho other than being a happy mail customer

asojfdowgh 5y ago

"Word" Except Word has had a pageless equivalent since Word 97, probably prior. It doesn't really feel that impressive or new age to include a basic and imo required feature from the competitor so very very late!

rkagerer 5y ago

<sigh> I guess I'm old fashioned but I really like being able to print things (even if sometimes not to real paper). eg. I print / save websites' ToS to PDF all the time. Over the last few years (especially from Chrome) the result looks increasingly garbled, nothing like what's on my screen. God forbid figuring out how to produce them as exhibits for litigation. Paper-sized, static content also tends to be a convient dimension for reviewing material of substance (eg. think academic papers). Often during tax season, or when reviewing database models or complex business logic workflows I'll print the spreadsheets / ERM / flowcharts across large 11x17 sheets that get tiled up on the walls or littered across the floor effectively giving me infinite screen space. Humans are built for working spatially like this rather than clicking back and forth endlessly between tabs. (And incidentally, coworkers have been amazed how much more efficient we become being able to crowd around such an exposition together). I'll keep doing that until wall-sized, surround-you-on-four-sides touchscreens become commonplace (or VR ergonomic enough you can't tell you're in it) along with annotation tools that match the intuitiveness of cutouts and sticky tape. And if I have to read hundreds of pages worth of literature I still prefer to do it on paper and save myself the eyestrain. Not bashing the new tech, it sounds cool, I just fear it will make rendering to more traditional layouts more difficult.