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I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up na

I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.

Rinzler89 3y ago
I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.
- impossiblefork 3y ago
  My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX. An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    >My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago. Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit. And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful. Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.
    - kaliszad 3y ago
      Arguably, most people I have encountered don't actually know how to use Microsoft Office in any kind of depth but it is a familiar environment for them. It is like most people don't actually drive a car well as supported by car accident statistics. Most work probably shouldn't be done in the Office suite but rather some information system copying the formalized process. Most text processing should probably decouple content from form a lot more and there certainly are people that do just that but it is not the norm.
      - Rinzler89 3y ago
        >but it is a familiar environment for them Being familiar with something way bette than needing to learn from scratch. That's the end of the sales pitch.

Rinzler89 3y ago

I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.

impossiblefork 3y ago
My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX. An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  >My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago. Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit. And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful. Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.
  - kaliszad 3y ago
    Arguably, most people I have encountered don't actually know how to use Microsoft Office in any kind of depth but it is a familiar environment for them. It is like most people don't actually drive a car well as supported by car accident statistics. Most work probably shouldn't be done in the Office suite but rather some information system copying the formalized process. Most text processing should probably decouple content from form a lot more and there certainly are people that do just that but it is not the norm.
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      >but it is a familiar environment for them Being familiar with something way bette than needing to learn from scratch. That's the end of the sales pitch.