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Comment by fumar | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office (by the way 2016 is a pretty solid software suite) is not thriving because of institutional knowledge. Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications (learn how to use it) and apply the same learnings to the rest of the suite, personal knowledge with a small learning curve. Also, tools like Excel are malleable and useable for most users in a company. If I create a unique data set in R, but would like to share it to everyone and have them play - its not going to spread very far. If I do the same in Excel, everyone can take a look and manipulate the data. I like to think of Office is a practical solution for most business with a wide range of users who are "generalists."

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> Office is great because users in most business settings can quickly pick up any of its applications

My experience is that 'users in business settings' absolutely refuse to consider any alternatives, mainly because of two 'fear factors': 1.) "Everyone else in my industry uses Microsoft Office products so I must as well" 2.) (Usually unstated explicitly) "Learning an alternative is going to cost me time and money and personal effort"

Sure, Excel can be a useful spreadsheet tool, but Word is a clumsy and difficult publishing tool. Many alternatives from LaTeX to LibreOffice to InDesign tend to be more portable and reliable but require the user to assume a degree of risk for learning something new and different. That seems to be enough to keep the majority of users away.

Absolutely; no one uses Office because they can "quickly pick up any of its applications". People use Office because they already "picked up" its applications. LibreOffice? Lemmee see here, I'm a bookkeeper/lab research assistant/factory supervisor that just wants to get my shit done and go home. There's this FOSS thing that mostly works but sometimes doesn't, or this Microsoft thing that I already know how to use and "works" perfectly (because it for sure can read its own format), and I don't give two poops about "Freedom!". I'm going to send a requisition to the boss for another Excel license.

For a lot of people, they don't want to learn alternatives ('cuz that's on my time, since they boss ain't training me), and the cost of the license isn't coming out of their pocket. Of course they use Office. That's not an unreasonable choice.

LibreOffice is also nowhere near as good as Office.

I do see more and more people using Google Docs instead of MS office. The online instant sharing is extremely compelling, and while the features of Docs and Sheets are pale compared to Word and Excel, they are good enough for what most people need.

Word is the perfect example of a lazy, mediocre product dominating a space through sheer inertia.

The current Mac version can't even keep track of recently opened files. Working with styles is torture. (You can't search them, you can't group them, you can't sort them, the ribbon selection seems to be random.)

The ribbon itself is an unusually eccentric example of software design.

A competitor could easily produce a leaner, better product. But it would never sell, because Word has so many corporate users that anyone who exchanges files with them has to use it too.

Locked-in products do sometimes fail, but they usually only fail to competing products from large companies. The textbook example is the move from QuarkXpress to InDesign, which only became possible because Quark were so famously greedy and lazy about Xpress they literally pissed off the entire print design industry.

Adobe not only had a better product, they also had the sales team and industry relationships to push it. Without those, it's likely Xpress would still be Number 1.

> A competitor could easily produce a leaner, better product.

There are several competitors in this space. Pages, LibreOffice, and Google docs come to mind. The only one I've ever heard described as better is Google docs. I'm not sure reality supports your statement.

LibreOffice doesn't support stuff Office does; Latex and InDesign are intended for different purposes.

>Latex and InDesign are intended for different purposes

Page layout is what LaTeX and InDesign are intended to do, and that's what Microsoft Word does too. Do you think Word users are only using it for a text editor?

Your argument is that Microsoft Office is not thriving because of institutional knowledge, then you proceed to prove that it is institutional knowledge that makes it a valuable tool.

If your arguments are: 1) Most users can pick it up easily due to familiarity. 2) Excel is a general tool usable by many disparate groups in the organization. 3) Excel is the lingua franca of manipulating data within the organization.

Then it seems to me that these would fall under the category of 'institutional knowledge', and you are in effect arguing that it is thriving because of institutional knowledge.

I stand corrected.

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