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Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companie

Google has the benefit of having all of Google drive around it But even then, the benchmark is Excel. Nearly every Excel user is saving files to disk. Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Maybe making networked drives better is another problem that needs solving, but I don't think spreadsheet applications should disregard that and just hope everyone moves to online. At a minimum you should give users a choice (which Excel/Office does, by the way) And we still haven't talked about navigating the UI with the keyboard. Limiting power users to online-only is like telling vim users they have to use Notepad++. Sure, they can do everything they could in vim, but it's overall objectively worse

dustingetz 3y ago
> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!
- airstrike 3y ago
  I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!
  - dustingetz 3y ago
    Ok, you're right – i don't think a smooth transition is possible in the office market – but I also don't think you can disrupt Office from within. Example: the thing that disrupted the New York Times was not a better newspaper, rather Facebook
    - airstrike 3y ago
      I agree! Which is why I'm not building the next Excel, but rather something different which offers (or "will offer") ~feature parity with Excel spreadsheets but approaches knowledge work and document authoring from an entirely new angle
- layer8 3y ago
  The benefit of files is that they are a consistent, application-independent abstraction. You can copy, move, rename, backup, version, and generally organize them however you want, restrict or grant access, without being constrained by what the respective application supports. Importantly, you can organize files from different applications together without those applications having to know anything about each other. Hyperlinks are no substitute for the object-like, independent nature of files. Applications that are not based on files create their own little separate universe, or rather island, that isn’t really interoperable.
  - dustingetz 3y ago
    > files are consistent and application-independent I see diverse, inhomogenous state schemas that are deeply coupled to the originating application (internal data structures serialized to disk!) and have arbitrary legacy structural constraints ("document") as well as seams between application silos
    - layer8 3y ago
      You’re talking about the file contents, not about files as objects. Regarding the file contents, how is that different when the data is proprietarily stored in hidden SaaS databases?
      - dustingetz 3y ago
        I sense a trap, but i'll bite – APIs and schemas and other logical data models can be remixed, at least in principle. Physical data models (i.e. coupled to storage layout) are too low level to be useful, all you can do is load them back into into their originating app.
jeffbee 3y ago
> the benchmark is Excel That's certainly true among a subset of users who demand Excel power features, but it is not a universal benchmark. People who more highly value collaboration might prefer Google Sheets. There are tons of users and use cases where the choice of local storage is irrelevant or even a drawback.

dustingetz 3y ago

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

airstrike 3y ago
I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!
- dustingetz 3y ago
  Ok, you're right – i don't think a smooth transition is possible in the office market – but I also don't think you can disrupt Office from within. Example: the thing that disrupted the New York Times was not a better newspaper, rather Facebook
  - airstrike 3y ago
    I agree! Which is why I'm not building the next Excel, but rather something different which offers (or "will offer") ~feature parity with Excel spreadsheets but approaches knowledge work and document authoring from an entirely new angle
layer8 3y ago
The benefit of files is that they are a consistent, application-independent abstraction. You can copy, move, rename, backup, version, and generally organize them however you want, restrict or grant access, without being constrained by what the respective application supports. Importantly, you can organize files from different applications together without those applications having to know anything about each other. Hyperlinks are no substitute for the object-like, independent nature of files. Applications that are not based on files create their own little separate universe, or rather island, that isn’t really interoperable.
- dustingetz 3y ago
  > files are consistent and application-independent I see diverse, inhomogenous state schemas that are deeply coupled to the originating application (internal data structures serialized to disk!) and have arbitrary legacy structural constraints ("document") as well as seams between application silos
  - layer8 3y ago
    You’re talking about the file contents, not about files as objects. Regarding the file contents, how is that different when the data is proprietarily stored in hidden SaaS databases?
    - dustingetz 3y ago
      I sense a trap, but i'll bite – APIs and schemas and other logical data models can be remixed, at least in principle. Physical data models (i.e. coupled to storage layout) are too low level to be useful, all you can do is load them back into into their originating app.

jeffbee 3y ago

> the benchmark is Excel That's certainly true among a subset of users who demand Excel power features, but it is not a universal benchmark. People who more highly value collaboration might prefer Google Sheets. There are tons of users and use cases where the choice of local storage is irrelevant or even a drawback.