3 ms·
The biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is that the general purpose office suite is dying a slow death. When you think about it, unless you’re working at a
by dangus 2y ago
The biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is that the general purpose office suite is dying a slow death.
When you think about it, unless you’re working at a very small business or on home stuff, most things you do with it should live elsewhere.
If you’re writing up some documentation for a business process, that should live in a system designed for that purpose where documents can be linked together and integrate with other systems. Examples include Confluence or Notion.
If you’re using Calc/Excel to handle some accounting or some other kind of quantitative organization, there’s probably a specialized system that you should be using, or just using a CRUD application.
If you’re doing HR stuff like performance reviews you need a system that can enforce tight read permissions and enforce a workflow.
The list goes on and on. The general business office suite only exists to catch general purpose processes that fall through the cracks where a better solution doesn’t exist, and every day that goes by eliminates another one of those use cases.
The second biggest blocker is that LibreOffice isn’t in your browser. It’s a slow-installing slow-loading clunky old desktop application.
The third biggest blocker to LibreOffice adoption is the dogshit ancient-looking UI. It looks nothing like a native application on any platform which constantly reminds you you’re using the knockoff of the Real McCoy.
And the final hurdle is that it has a dorky name.
- maeil 2y ago> If you’re using Calc/Excel to handle some accounting or some other kind of quantitative organization, there’s probably a specialized system that you should be using, or just using a CRUD application. This greatly underestimates the importance of Excel for anything to do with physical goods, which is all of the world outside of the tiny SV/HN SaaS bubble. Excel files are the API that glues every factory, supplier, vendor and system together. Good luck replacing that and forcing all of the involved parties to switch to this replacement.
- GeneralMaximus 2y agoYep. I’m currently working for a client who build software for the insurance industry, and we have a whole pipeline to parse and generate Excel files. The industry mostly runs on Excel and email. Without support for parsing those spreadsheets, my client would never have been able to convince their customers to use the rest of their software.
- dangus 2y agoIt’s important today. Is Excel usage increasing or decreasing over time? That’s important. If it even loses 5% usage per year that’s huge over time.
- dangus 2y agoImportant today. Is usage of Excel increasing over time? Or decreasing?
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoI don’t think that LibreOffice not being in the browser is necessarily a blocker in itself. For something like an advanced office suite, where you don’t want to have browser toolbars/tabs/etc eating up valuable screen space that could be going to app palettes and such instead, not being chained to a browser is a boon. Besides that, when software serves a purpose well, people do not hesitate to download and install it. If need to install an app causes significant user dropoff, I’d say that’s an indictment of the app’s functionality/UX/etc. It basically means that the value the app provides isn’t worth an extremely minor one-time inconvenience, which is a pretty low bar to clear.
- dangus 2y agoHuge problem. How do I view a document on my phone with LibreOffice? How do I show my document to a client with an unknown different environment? The web is universal. I’m pretty sure half of all Internet traffic is on phones. Just look at the kind of business Google Workspaces and Office 365 are doing. Heck, LibreOffice has an OSS competitor on the web with OnlyOffice.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoBy installing the corresponding mobile apps. If access without a dedicated app is important, export a PDF. I really don’t like treating web access as a requirement if only because it adds enormous complexity to an already-complex project and brings much higher recurring expenses to keep the hosted service online. Neither are conducive to a free product that’s so highly reliant on volunteered time and donations. Web apps work best as closed, paid SaaSes funded by VCs, where complexity and overhead can be papered over by money.
- dangus 2y agoI think this view that web apps are unnecessary is really naive to the way that people prefer to work in the modern world. Google's office suite commands a 44% marketshare and is essentially a web-only platform on desktops. If you haven't been paying attention, yes, that means it has surpassed Office 365 in marketshare. The market spoke loudly about how it wants to work when Google took the #1 spot away from Microsoft by making documents accessible and simple to anyone with a web browser. Online documents are a liberating experience where the benefits are obvious. There's no more losing files and forgetting to save, no more passing files back and forth, no more worries about multiple devices. Online document editing "just works" Someone who wants to use LibreOffice in a modern way like this is just SOL. Someone who doesn't own a desktop computer can't use it. Tablet and smartphone users are stuck with a third party solution that utilizes the codebase but isn't really LibreOffice, and it's a 3 star-reviewed app with the top review complaining about how easy it is to permanently lose work. Web apps are all over the open source ecosystem. They aren't just reserved for big money VCs. I would argue that LibreOffice's own history was made possible by sponsorship by a very big company (Oracle) and that OnlyOffice being developed by a rather small company pokes a big hole in the idea that web apps work best aas closed paid SaaS products. Obviously, OnlyOffice is able to be a sustainable business while offering a compelling self-hosted community solution. I also think of Bitwarden as a success story for making modern web and desktop software that is both fully open source and hosted in the cloud in a way that makes it easy for users. I personally think that the document foundation just "doesn't get it" and isn't really prioritizing giving LibreOffice the modern overhaul it desperately needs. OnlyOffice is what LibreOffice would look like if The Document Foundation had their priorities straight.