4 ms·

Technology has a ratchet effect at scale - as a solution becomes widely adopted, it switches from being a convenience to being a necessity, because people start

Technology has a ratchet effect at scale - as a solution becomes widely adopted, it switches from being a convenience to being a necessity, because people start building more stuff on top of it. It's as true of to-the-minute accurate clocks as it is of smartphone banking. You can still run a version of Word from 2004. It's fine, if all you need is to write some thoughts down for yourself. But the moment you need to collaborate with other people via a Word document, you'll find it difficult without the modern version with all its user-hostile aspects - and more importantly, other people will find you difficult to work with. Same applies to other software, web and smartphones, and to everything else in life - the further you deviate from the mainstream, the costlier it is for you. Deviate too much, and you just become a social outcast.

micahdeath 1y ago
Social Outcast here... It's pretty good.
- imcritic 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - ashirviskas 1y ago
    This is not a HN worthy comment, be nice.
    - imcritic 1y ago
      I am nice, it was an illustration of what a logical position/reply would be towards their position "I am a social outcasts". It's a poor argument "it works for me as a social outcast". It's not normal to be one.
bluGill 1y ago
Which is why we need to ban together. Libreoffice isn't dominate, but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored. Also if you are using it you are not alone - you are an annoying deviation, but there are enough of you that many cannot ignore you. The more people who also use libreoffice the more power we have. If we can get to just 5% market share we cannot be ignored. (it need not be libreoffice, there are other choices that support that file format well enough which is what we care about.)
- Arainach 1y ago
  >but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored. This is the Hacker News bubble in action. Most of the world, most of America, most of China, India, etc. haven't even heard of it. They ignore it and they thrive. Maybe you need to pay attention if you're dealing with certain European governments these days - I'm not sure because I completely ignore it and haven't paid attention since there was just OpenOffice and LibreOffice didn't even exist yet.
  - NewJazz 1y ago
    Source on most of China/India not having heard of libreoffice?
    - tredre3 1y ago
      Kingsoft recently announced that WPS Office has 620M MAU users, the bulk of which is in China. Microsoft has even more Office users in China https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-microsoft-office-rival-reaches-093000488.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-microsoft-office-rival... So if China has heard of LibreOffice, they clearly didn't like what they've heard...
      - spookie 1y ago
        It's the product of a government owned company... in China. What do you expect? Moreover, what you write is monitored, and you may loose documents based on what you write [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-frozen-document-in-china-unleashes-a-furor-over-privacy-11657887259 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-frozen-document-in-china-unle...
        autoexec 1y ago
        > Moreover, what you write is monitored So just like MS Word then
      - NewJazz 1y ago
noosphr 1y ago
Word from 2004 works better than the office 365 version. I've used it in the last three years to automate document generation in an enterprise because the latest versions of word: 1). Randomly break during automatic updates you can't really turn off. 2). Automatically upload everything to the cloud even when you tell them no. This isn't the 90s when closed software was better. We are firmly in the enshitification stage of windows and office. Open source is better and is the only sane choice for enterprise. Those are not words I thought I'd ever write in 2005 or 2015, but here we are.
- worik 1y ago
  Office 365 failed utterly today....
zkmon 1y ago
And we must let someone or some crowd dictate what our basic needs are. That crowd is part of our world. If we stick to our bows and arrows they come with canons and horses. Argh!
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  That worked fine before agricultural revolution. Since then, if you stick to your bows and arrows, you get sidelined and lose access to benefits of society and civilization.
  - zkmon 1y ago
    If it forces you to keep running with more and more speed just to stay where you are, I wouldn't call it as "benefits of society and civilization". A lot of what we call as progress is a forced transformation of basic needs for the gains of business and politics not people. Even the healthcare, which everyone thinks as a "benefit" of the progress, only resulted in having lopsided demographic pyramid with countries full of old people. I can't think of single scientific result benefiting the human race in its evolutionary goals.
    - XorNot 1y ago
      Countries aren't full of old people because of healthcare, they're full of old people because birthrates plummeted after one of the largest generations ever was born in the post-war period.
      - Yeul 1y ago
        Turned out that if you gave people choice they'd rather not have 7 kids! Surprise surprise.
      - dredmorbius 1y ago
        Causality is complicated and probably impossible to untangle, but the vast decreases in both infant/early child and maternal mortality played a huge role here. If half your children didn't die by age 20 (or 5), it was possible to have much smaller families. Industrialisation and urbanisation made children net liabilities rather than household assets (providing labour even at a very young age). Financialisation of real estate along with the rest of the economy made earning and saving money critical, and made non-cash or low-cash lifestyles highly marginal (self-sufficient existence or providing many goods and services through the home directly). All that in combination with improved adult lifespans meant that the demographic pyramid consolidated at the bottom and expanded at the top. There are still countries where this isn't the case, most notably now in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly where HIV/AIDS remains endemic: Contrast Tanzania and Italy, for example: <https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html> <https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html>

micahdeath 1y ago

Social Outcast here... It's pretty good.

imcritic 1y ago
[flagged]
- ashirviskas 1y ago
  This is not a HN worthy comment, be nice.
  - imcritic 1y ago
    I am nice, it was an illustration of what a logical position/reply would be towards their position "I am a social outcasts". It's a poor argument "it works for me as a social outcast". It's not normal to be one.

bluGill 1y ago

Which is why we need to ban together. Libreoffice isn't dominate, but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored. Also if you are using it you are not alone - you are an annoying deviation, but there are enough of you that many cannot ignore you. The more people who also use libreoffice the more power we have. If we can get to just 5% market share we cannot be ignored. (it need not be libreoffice, there are other choices that support that file format well enough which is what we care about.)

Arainach 1y ago
>but it has enough market share that it can't be completely ignored. This is the Hacker News bubble in action. Most of the world, most of America, most of China, India, etc. haven't even heard of it. They ignore it and they thrive. Maybe you need to pay attention if you're dealing with certain European governments these days - I'm not sure because I completely ignore it and haven't paid attention since there was just OpenOffice and LibreOffice didn't even exist yet.
- NewJazz 1y ago
  Source on most of China/India not having heard of libreoffice?
  - tredre3 1y ago
    Kingsoft recently announced that WPS Office has 620M MAU users, the bulk of which is in China. Microsoft has even more Office users in China https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-microsoft-office-rival-reaches-093000488.html?guccounter=1 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-microsoft-office-rival... So if China has heard of LibreOffice, they clearly didn't like what they've heard...
    - spookie 1y ago
      It's the product of a government owned company... in China. What do you expect? Moreover, what you write is monitored, and you may loose documents based on what you write [1]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-frozen-document-in-china-unleashes-a-furor-over-privacy-11657887259 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-frozen-document-in-china-unle...
      - autoexec 1y ago
        > Moreover, what you write is monitored So just like MS Word then
    - NewJazz 1y ago

noosphr 1y ago

Word from 2004 works better than the office 365 version. I've used it in the last three years to automate document generation in an enterprise because the latest versions of word: 1). Randomly break during automatic updates you can't really turn off. 2). Automatically upload everything to the cloud even when you tell them no. This isn't the 90s when closed software was better. We are firmly in the enshitification stage of windows and office. Open source is better and is the only sane choice for enterprise. Those are not words I thought I'd ever write in 2005 or 2015, but here we are.

worik 1y ago
Office 365 failed utterly today....

zkmon 1y ago

And we must let someone or some crowd dictate what our basic needs are. That crowd is part of our world. If we stick to our bows and arrows they come with canons and horses. Argh!

TeMPOraL 1y ago
That worked fine before agricultural revolution. Since then, if you stick to your bows and arrows, you get sidelined and lose access to benefits of society and civilization.
- zkmon 1y ago
  If it forces you to keep running with more and more speed just to stay where you are, I wouldn't call it as "benefits of society and civilization". A lot of what we call as progress is a forced transformation of basic needs for the gains of business and politics not people. Even the healthcare, which everyone thinks as a "benefit" of the progress, only resulted in having lopsided demographic pyramid with countries full of old people. I can't think of single scientific result benefiting the human race in its evolutionary goals.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Countries aren't full of old people because of healthcare, they're full of old people because birthrates plummeted after one of the largest generations ever was born in the post-war period.
    - Yeul 1y ago
      Turned out that if you gave people choice they'd rather not have 7 kids! Surprise surprise.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      Causality is complicated and probably impossible to untangle, but the vast decreases in both infant/early child and maternal mortality played a huge role here. If half your children didn't die by age 20 (or 5), it was possible to have much smaller families. Industrialisation and urbanisation made children net liabilities rather than household assets (providing labour even at a very young age). Financialisation of real estate along with the rest of the economy made earning and saving money critical, and made non-cash or low-cash lifestyles highly marginal (self-sufficient existence or providing many goods and services through the home directly). All that in combination with improved adult lifespans meant that the demographic pyramid consolidated at the bottom and expanded at the top. There are still countries where this isn't the case, most notably now in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly where HIV/AIDS remains endemic: Contrast Tanzania and Italy, for example: <https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html> <https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html>