2 ms·
Being successful as a business has as much or more to do with market power than with code quality. I am lucky that I can avoid their products. But millions of
by nequo 4y ago
Being successful as a business has as much or more to do with market power than with code quality.
I am lucky that I can avoid their products. But millions of users and orgs can't because that's what others around them use. So they're stuck with it no matter how much worse it is than open-source alternatives.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoIn 2022, it really isn't "you're stuck". Even if your org uses MS prodcucts, there are interoperable open source suites these days. The problem is that they're shit. Yes, they work for small documents, but star/sun/open/libre/EtcOffice all fall over when you do something as simple as trying to sort a 30,000 row spreadsheet on several column criteria. (and yes, that is trivially simple. If your software can't do that in a performant way, you don't understand what product you're trying to out-compete) It's not that there's no alternative, it's that the alternatives are just not good enough when it comes to "I need this stupidly complicated thing, thanks to 20 years of spreadsheet formula history at my organization that I have zero power to even remotely change, done in seconds. Not minutes".