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Office 2007 just got installed on my box at work, and the first thing I saw was a blue haze of controls and tabs that just confused me to no end. When the feat

Office 2007 just got installed on my box at work, and the first thing I saw was a blue haze of controls and tabs that just confused me to no end. When the feature set is as mature as what Office has, replacing the UI makes for more "look how old my current version is!" fodder for upgrades, but doesn't do much for making people on the fence want to stay with the product. Then again, I am curious to know what the penetration levels are for various wiki products vs Word in the business market. I just can't imagine large non-computer companies embracing wikis terribly quickly. Word documents as data transfer still provide a simple and easy-to-understand model for how to write and share, even if it's a pain-in-the-ass in actual use. If wikis want to replace word effectively, they'll need something like an Adobe AIR client. Web browsers are nice for lots of things, but I've nearly pulled my disks out and punted them across the room when an extra tab/backspace causes the browser to go back a page.

gaius 17y ago
As I say above, a "real" word processor is much more than a text editor with WYSIWYG formatting. Anyone who works on reasonably complex documents would expect their software to keep track of cross references to tables, figures, sections, pages, etc. This is a feature than simply doesn't matter when writing a letter or a CV which is probably what most people actually use a word processor for. But Word 2007 has a whole tab devoted to just this, and another whole tab devoted to change tracking. The people who need it really need it, and ultimately they're the ones that decide what word processor the organization uses. You might get them to switch to OpenOffice, but Google Docs is long way from ready for prime time.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  But Word's pretty terrible at that stuff, too. I've nearly thermite'd my machine when word screws up my styles or starts dancing with my inline images. I've stuck to svn/latex/emacs for real docs. Word tries, but it's just infuriating to make it put out a well-formatted, consistent document when you hit over ~150 pages. If you can do it, you've got sk1llz I don't.
  - gaius 17y ago
    Yeah, that's bloody annoying. But my point is: people who believe that Google Docs is a viable substitute for Word (and OpenOffice, etc) are probably not trying to write particularly complex documents, because if they were they'd have run into missing features.

gaius 17y ago

As I say above, a "real" word processor is much more than a text editor with WYSIWYG formatting. Anyone who works on reasonably complex documents would expect their software to keep track of cross references to tables, figures, sections, pages, etc. This is a feature than simply doesn't matter when writing a letter or a CV which is probably what most people actually use a word processor for. But Word 2007 has a whole tab devoted to just this, and another whole tab devoted to change tracking. The people who need it really need it, and ultimately they're the ones that decide what word processor the organization uses. You might get them to switch to OpenOffice, but Google Docs is long way from ready for prime time.

lallysingh 17y ago
But Word's pretty terrible at that stuff, too. I've nearly thermite'd my machine when word screws up my styles or starts dancing with my inline images. I've stuck to svn/latex/emacs for real docs. Word tries, but it's just infuriating to make it put out a well-formatted, consistent document when you hit over ~150 pages. If you can do it, you've got sk1llz I don't.
- gaius 17y ago
  Yeah, that's bloody annoying. But my point is: people who believe that Google Docs is a viable substitute for Word (and OpenOffice, etc) are probably not trying to write particularly complex documents, because if they were they'd have run into missing features.