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It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc It’s an entire ecosystem Also, I have

It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc It’s an entire ecosystem Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb

trelane 1y ago
If LibreOffice were smart, they'd introduce free licensing for schools and universities, so the students could learn it and then ask for it when they get to jobs later on. Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.
- piker 1y ago
  LibreOffice is free and GPL.
  - trelane 1y ago
    That's the joke, yes. Though it's MPL, not GPL: https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses
    - piker 1y ago
      Woosh!
jasonjayr 1y ago
At one point LibreOffice + MS Office were pretty much on par with each other. But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment. It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience. If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?
- firesteelrain 1y ago
  Google tried to get kids hooked in school and it’s decent. But when you want to do serious work, you need to use Microsoft products. Google’s product is like a toy
  - trelane 1y ago
    Most serious users can use things other than Microsoft just fine. The problem is file compatibility. Unfortunately, network effects are very much a thing. Plus most users just don't realize they don't actually have to keep shovelling money at Microsoft.
    - eddythompson80 1y ago
      I don't know much about advanced Google Docs, but I know that's the far from true for Google Sheets. Google Sheets covers a shit ton of ground that Excel covers, but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets. We had a lot of marketing and sales people who wanted to use Google Sheets instead of Excel to load sales reports from a shared PG database. This is of course a built-in feature (loading a PG table as a sheet) in Excel. Google Sheets obviously doesn't support any imports. They are all paid plugins, and they all make you pay per row or cell or column. You can write a plugin to do it, except their funky AppScript (which is a custom synchronous Javascript/V8 environment where there is no async or callbacks, and promises block. Except, the plugin can only connect to MySQL. PG support ask has been open since 2011. They decided in 2014 that they don't plan to support PG. Then in 2018 they thought maybe they can only support GCP Postgres.[1] Ok, fine. You make your own API to call and load data. No, you can't return more than 50 MBs. So better split your query. Oh, you want to load a 50MB CSV? There are 3 different APIs for that: - "Import from GDrive". This is the one you want. Import 50MB in a couple of seconds. But it also requires the most permissions to full access the user's GDrive - "Basic Import API". This imports at ~100kbps but not always. gets slower for large data - "Advanced Import API". This imports at ~250kbps but not always. gets slower for small data and you need to run your own benchmarks[2][3] to understand which API to use in which context, then keep reruning them as things change. [1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1 [2]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2f20fe4 https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2... [3]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6da269e7 https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6d...
freeopinion 1y ago
I have met very few non-techies that could tell the difference between Word and Wordpad or use them any differently. Most people below the age of 30 can switch between Google Docs or Word without blinking. They don't use more than a few of the features of either. This "big hill" you mention is a fantasy.
- trelane 1y ago
  You're right for home users. In businesses, the hill is also that some users are power users that have locked themselves in, in slightly different ways between the different power users. Also the company has also locked itself in by drinking deeply from the Microsoft well (e.g. AD and sharepoint and Windows etc) and marketing away will cost them a lot of time and effort, and therefore money.
  - freeopinion 1y ago
    My comment was focused on Word. There is definitely a lot of lock-in for the larger MS ecosystem in business. But that is the nature of large bureaucracies. They struggle to switch between UPS and FedEx, or between Staples and OfficeDepot. Switching away from the MS ecosystem is significantly harder than that.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    If the lawyers and the financial analysts need Windows Office for certain uses let them use them. But I'd note that the first edition of a book I wrote a while back had a Sharepoint workflow and had moved away by the second edition. The licensing/support is cheaper carries some weight. But Windows to Linux mostly didn't win a lot of fights on the desktop. But Google Docs for collaboration and general simplicity does win over a lot of companies.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else. I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Latterly, I worked at a predominantly open source company that switched from LibreOffice to Google Docs over the screams of many. It was a night and day improvement both in terms of the software itself and the ability to collaborate.
- jajuuka 1y ago
  LibreOffice very much took cues from the old Office setup. While alternatives like OnlyOffice took cues from the current Office setup.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    Libreoffice was formerly openoffice which was formerly staroffice, an office suite that has its deepest origin in Starwriter, a word processor for the Zilog Z80 released in 1985.

trelane 1y ago

If LibreOffice were smart, they'd introduce free licensing for schools and universities, so the students could learn it and then ask for it when they get to jobs later on. Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.

piker 1y ago
LibreOffice is free and GPL.
- trelane 1y ago
  That's the joke, yes. Though it's MPL, not GPL: https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses
  - piker 1y ago
    Woosh!

jasonjayr 1y ago

At one point LibreOffice + MS Office were pretty much on par with each other. But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment. It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience. If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?

firesteelrain 1y ago
Google tried to get kids hooked in school and it’s decent. But when you want to do serious work, you need to use Microsoft products. Google’s product is like a toy
- trelane 1y ago
  Most serious users can use things other than Microsoft just fine. The problem is file compatibility. Unfortunately, network effects are very much a thing. Plus most users just don't realize they don't actually have to keep shovelling money at Microsoft.
  - eddythompson80 1y ago
    I don't know much about advanced Google Docs, but I know that's the far from true for Google Sheets. Google Sheets covers a shit ton of ground that Excel covers, but a serious user can never replace Excel with Sheets. We had a lot of marketing and sales people who wanted to use Google Sheets instead of Excel to load sales reports from a shared PG database. This is of course a built-in feature (loading a PG table as a sheet) in Excel. Google Sheets obviously doesn't support any imports. They are all paid plugins, and they all make you pay per row or cell or column. You can write a plugin to do it, except their funky AppScript (which is a custom synchronous Javascript/V8 environment where there is no async or callbacks, and promises block. Except, the plugin can only connect to MySQL. PG support ask has been open since 2011. They decided in 2014 that they don't plan to support PG. Then in 2018 they thought maybe they can only support GCP Postgres.[1] Ok, fine. You make your own API to call and load data. No, you can't return more than 50 MBs. So better split your query. Oh, you want to load a 50MB CSV? There are 3 different APIs for that: - "Import from GDrive". This is the one you want. Import 50MB in a couple of seconds. But it also requires the most permissions to full access the user's GDrive - "Basic Import API". This imports at ~100kbps but not always. gets slower for large data - "Advanced Import API". This imports at ~250kbps but not always. gets slower for small data and you need to run your own benchmarks[2][3] to understand which API to use in which context, then keep reruning them as things change. [1]: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36752790?pli=1 [2]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2f20fe4 https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/d102c9600ba12a162c667287d2... [3]: https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6da269e7 https://gist.github.com/tanaikech/030203c695b308606041587e6d...

freeopinion 1y ago

I have met very few non-techies that could tell the difference between Word and Wordpad or use them any differently. Most people below the age of 30 can switch between Google Docs or Word without blinking. They don't use more than a few of the features of either. This "big hill" you mention is a fantasy.

trelane 1y ago
You're right for home users. In businesses, the hill is also that some users are power users that have locked themselves in, in slightly different ways between the different power users. Also the company has also locked itself in by drinking deeply from the Microsoft well (e.g. AD and sharepoint and Windows etc) and marketing away will cost them a lot of time and effort, and therefore money.
- freeopinion 1y ago
  My comment was focused on Word. There is definitely a lot of lock-in for the larger MS ecosystem in business. But that is the nature of large bureaucracies. They struggle to switch between UPS and FedEx, or between Staples and OfficeDepot. Switching away from the MS ecosystem is significantly harder than that.
- ghaff 1y ago
  If the lawyers and the financial analysts need Windows Office for certain uses let them use them. But I'd note that the first edition of a book I wrote a while back had a Sharepoint workflow and had moved away by the second edition. The licensing/support is cheaper carries some weight. But Windows to Linux mostly didn't win a lot of fights on the desktop. But Google Docs for collaboration and general simplicity does win over a lot of companies.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else. I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.

ghaff 1y ago
Latterly, I worked at a predominantly open source company that switched from LibreOffice to Google Docs over the screams of many. It was a night and day improvement both in terms of the software itself and the ability to collaborate.
jajuuka 1y ago
LibreOffice very much took cues from the old Office setup. While alternatives like OnlyOffice took cues from the current Office setup.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Libreoffice was formerly openoffice which was formerly staroffice, an office suite that has its deepest origin in Starwriter, a word processor for the Zilog Z80 released in 1985.