Amazon Planning a Microsoft Office Killer | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Planning a Microsoft Office Killer

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117 pointsjswny109 comments

Having worked in aws for two years, I have zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual.

Also, I'm sorry, amazon has absolutely no strength in enterprise marketing, and Microsoft is king of that realm for a reason.

>zero faith in Amazon's ability to deliver a compelling user interface for anything remotely casual.

Hah, took the words out of my mouth. Prime video is the first example that comes to mind.

Hell their main site is a mix of various styles of ui changes from over the years. It's really inconsistent and sometimes confusing. Example being search filters. You can check the prime button but changing another filter may remove it.

Its always been something I've thought about briefly before going about my day, never really in any depth.

What do you think the reason is? My thought is, not many people complain loudly so why invest the resources in an overhaul. If it ain't _totally_ broke why rock the boat kinda thing.

That or the engineers build the frontend ;-)

I think it migh be the result of too much a|b testing. Everything hung feels ultra optimized for whatever metric they're going for that week.

Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer lifestyle gadget" or Apple announcing an enterprise server.

They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

>Yeah, this is a bit like Microsoft announcing they're going to make a "killer lifestyle gadget"

What, you don't think the Zune was killer? /s

>They have the resources to succeed, it's just that it's baked into the company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

No, not really. I don't think it's even possible for a "lifestyle gadget" to succeed as long as it has the "Microsoft" name on it, even if Apple secretly designed it for them and MS seriously committed to it.

With the Zune, MS really was focused on making it succeed, and it still failed miserably. As a company, they just don't "get it" (they don't understand what it'd take to succeed in that market), plus their brand is a big negative in that market. IIRC, the Zune didn't even have MS's name or logo on it anywhere, so they even understood that much, but it still wasn't enough.

I think MS trying to make trendy consumer devices is a lot like Jeep trying to make sporty electric cars. It just won't work; the company doesn't understand the market and the consumers won't take the company seriously.

To be fair, the Zune was Steve Ballmers baby, I'm convinced Satya Nadella (I thought it was a woman for the first year or so) would make a better product in that regard.

> it's just that it's baked into the company DNA not to focus on the things they need to excel in that market.

Amazon as a publisher doesn't have the right outlook, mark my word.

Yes! Amazon Video can't do something as simple as "return me to the thing I was watching when I log in".

I'm watching a TV series and every time I start it (through the Xbox app) it forgets that entire series/season unless I save the season. And even if I save it, it will jump me to the latest episode that I started rather than the one I was watching when I quit.

Edit: also, I've long had a pet peeve with AWS, where they will gladly let you walk through all the steps for setting up an EC2 server before saying "oops, you don't have permission to do that".

> it will jump me to the latest episode that I started rather than the one I was watching when I quit.

When is the last episode you started different than the one you were watching when you quit? Do they auto-play when finishing so if you started episode 2 and watched until episode 6 it would start from episode 2 again?

No, I mean if I (or someone on that account), years ago, had watched episode 18 of the season until the middle, and I'm starting the season from the beginning and watch until episode 3 -- then every time I come to the season, it will jump me to 18 rather than 3.

And it doesn't even (by default) show that season in "recently watched" or other place that's easy to get to!

Copying Office and making it a webapp with less features is not killing Office. Not even close.

Microsoft Office is legacy software. Its killer won't have anything to do with, it will be totally different. For example, Slack.

I mean, killing PowerPoint is not making a webapp to create presentations, but creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary.

Ideas: SaaS, ML, cloud dashboards and analytics, communication.

Credit: Benedict Evans.

Slack will have a hard time killing office, seeing as MS Teams does pretty much all that Slack does, and integrates with all the rest of Office 365.

I'm not sure a lot of people that use Slack use Office. I know a lot that use Slack + Google Docs almost exclusively.

It's a matter of tradition. Older firms with a large collection of native Office documents need Office. Newer ones without that baggage can be more adaptable.

So you mean Quip? https://quip.com/

Looks like a kids play thing. MS office with Teams basically does all that already, plus a ton of other things.

> creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary

I think you're missing the point. Presentations are no different than giving a speech with visual aids, with the additional benefit of sharing your notes after the fact. You can give a sales pitch, a conference talk, an internal update, or share some info about your favorite band. Its free form and incredibly versatile. Analytics isn't going to replace a conference talk, or a sales pitch.

That's not to mention the wide variety of uses for Excel. It's everything from a financial analysis tool to a digital scratch paper.

Slack is fine but it's just a slow irc client with pretty good search.

>> "...pretty good search."

Ugh all I want is to be able to grep my Slack conversations instead of using their search interface, which drives me mad :( :( :(

Like I said, it's pretty good but not great. I'm generally ambivalent about slack and think it has a really nice UI, but very poor UX.

>Microsoft Office is legacy software. Its killer won't have anything to do with, it will be totally different. For example, Slack.

A business can't write office documents and do spreadsheets in Slack, and they'll need to do both things well into the year 2100.

What you describe is not an "office killer". Is just an app that might win businesses for a different task.

At best an Outlook Server killer, or a totally new category.

>I mean, killing PowerPoint is not making a webapp to create presentations, but creating something that makes creating presentations unnecessary.

That's not how it works, except in a handful of situations and only when the new product covers the same basic need (e.g. Netflix vs VHS or Cinema).

Why everyone hasn't switched to Google Docs/Sheets is beyond me. Files aren't even necessary any more, unless you count exporting to .pdf, so you can provide an immutable copy to someone ( which they are usually going to just print anyway )

Google docs is still way slower for me than Microsoft Word. I can open a 200 page work document in word with table of contents, comments, etc. and make changes to it with no problem. Opening and working on my 18 page google doc file where I write my notes is so much slower and more annoying in comparison. Not to mention all the features that the Google programs lack in comparison to Word.

Yes, and browser-based apps still don't seem to perform (subjectively) as well as standalone desktop apps. I do see that changing in the future, however.

>Why everyone hasn't switched to Google Docs/Sheets is beyond me.

Much slower, much less features (people might not use all 100% of Word, but the 20% they do use has a lot of non-overlapping features between them), files are totally necessary, and not all businesses/organizations want (or are even allowed by law) to give their data to Google.

Yeah, this makes way more sense. Why replace something that works that everyone knows how to use with something else that does the same thing that no one knows how to use.

Whoever finds a way to replace Excel spreadsheets with something better will make a lot of money...

As much as it would be nice to have an alternative to MS Office, it seems like a lot of these 'killers' focus on the wrong things that are needed.

1. Completely offline use, including local save, backups etc. Which goes completely against the cloud. But this is something that Microsoft got right with 365. I can install it and use it completely isolated from the internet and still collaborate online if needed.

2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in.

3. Suite interoperability. I need to be able to make a chart in Excel. Copy and Paste (Ctrl+C/V, not some export process) it over to Word in the document, then paste it into PowerPoint for the presentation. Or maybe save it out as a PNG for Latex or something.

If you haven't tried LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) in a while I highly recommend it. Works great with Zotero for citations and they have fixed a lot of the formatting issues in Writer/Word and data manipulation shortcomings in Calc/Excel. I haven't needed MS Office for 4 months.

The problem with LibreOffice is that it has terrible Word compatibility.

Documents just come out looking completely different. Tables go over extra pages, text is randomly overlayed, etc.

Well, at least we are documenting the problems, you can filter by "docx" to see for yourself: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Tracking_Bugs

So it's easy to jump in, if one has a passion to fix interop issues..

In my experience, this typically happens if you're using the manual layout systems, nudging and adjusting image sizes and text boxes pixel by pixel until the output is "perfect." This is brittle even in Word. You should be able to insert a section or paragraph without messing up your whole document.

Instead, use paragraph breaks, page breaks, and styles to typeset the document. Choose top/bottom wrapping of images, and keep tables simple and clean.

It usually looks better, it's easier to edit later, and it just works in whatever editor you're using - whether Office 97, Office 2017, Google Docs, or exporting to HTML.

I can't control what others do in the documents they send me...

The problem with Word is that it has terrible LibreOffice compatibility.

And if word were trying to replace libre office, that might be the case.

I also love it to the point of having it installed even when I have access to Word.

My reason is because I find it much better to clean up other peoples weird formatting (yep, seems some people don't use styles. Or use styles and then go over and fix every heading manually or something.)

I have, and at least for my purposes it did not fit the bill. It has been a little while, and maybe they got footnotes working finally, but before they were horrendous. And yes the Zotero plugin is nice. Libre Office is definitely the closest alternative to MS Office, but just not quite there for me. I do recommend it all the time for people who are very lightweight users though.

Have you tried it since version 5.2? Previous versions didn't cut it for me either. This one does. For one, it now has multi-column copy/paste in Calc.

I came back to LibreOffice recently. Hoping not to experience previous problems. It soon bungled a save of one of its own documents causing me hours of work. I expect to go back to Word, sigh.

"2. Academic writing features, like citations, footnotes, and things like that. No alternative I have tried has ever been able to easily do these things, and MS Office has them all built in."

There are dozens of things like this for different niches. You need citation tools, someone else couldn't do his job without pivot tables, someone else uses imported shapes in powerpoint ten times a day, and so forth and so on. That's a big reason that I'm skeptical anyone will be "killing" MS office anytime soon.

Right, there are so many 'little' things in MS Office, that people use all the time. It is likely that no one person is using all the features, but on any given day all of the features are key to someone's job. And since they have the home field advantage, it will be a long time before anyone can come close to killing it.

That's the first time I read that "feature-creep" is actually a good thing :)

It's complicated!

The crazy feature bloat is a real negative for Word, and yet also a huge strength.

It's interesting look at documents produced and consumed by different industries to get a real grasp on the variety of use cases

Oh, and a legal document written in Word 2.0 an æon ago needs to have every word on the same line, and paginate identically on every subsequent version

It isn't necessarily. It's perfectly reasonable to have a streamlined product that supports those features that are most commonly used. And to tell someone that wants the other 90% of features that get 10% of the use to go with some other product.

On the other hand, if your objective is to build something that does incorporate more or less every feature that people use, then you're going to need a lot of features because so many workflows have specialized requirements in some area.

The classic adage is that each user only uses about 60% of Office, but every user uses a different 60%.

I suspect that "dozens" is understating the size of the required feature set by multiple orders of magnitude.

And it's not just the size of the feature set that makes tackling this difficult - that's something that a company like Amazon could solve by throwing hundreds of programmers and millions of dollars at the problem. But they can't just rebuild the education of the users to invoke their particular use case.

Yeah my mom has been in marketing analytics for the last couple of decades and given some of the spreadsheets, tables and graphs I've seen her work on I'm skeptical of anything coming close to replacing Office any time soon. Outside of your typical Google Docs (Drive?) use-cases, MS Office is a set of true professional tools with all the nuance and depth that entails.

Exactly. You will have to take Excel from the cold dead hand of accountants, actuaries, anyone working in finance, etc. If Microsoft get Excel (online and offline) integration with Big Data right, and I find them a bit lagging on this, they will be the kind of the hill for this market. Once you get people used to a tool, it's hard to change habit. It's the same thing with programmers and programming languages.

Completely agree with this. Google suite has struggled to gain adoption in my past 3 companies because of a number of little things it doesn't quite get in parity with Office. It's a (rare?) example of when the 80% or even 95% solution isn't enough.

Also, few products are so ingrained in a user's workflow as Office. Many professionals have been using the suite for over a decade(s), so the switching cost is high.

My company was to move completely away from Office to Google's suite of products 3 years ago. Except for just the few macro jockeys that required Excel. It's harder to get approval for an Office license now, but most people that had Office 3 years ago, still have it today (except for Outlook, that one is gone). It's really Excel that seems to keep people from moving to Google's product, though. Word and the others aren't that big a problem.

Excel is the biggest one, for sure. I still think there are many who really prefer the features and functionality of PowerPoint and Outlook, though. I haven't seen that be the case for Word, but Word has never really been a significant part of my work flow.

"All applications running on AppStream are based in the cloud, so they require no processing power on the target device, with all resources, including storage needs, provided by Amazon." - italics added for emphasis

Has the author looked at the processing required by a modern web browser? This is such a BS statement.

Was thinking the same thing. Cloud doesn't remove need for local processing power. It's simply shifting into a sandboxed environment (the browser). Ironically this could make many apps much less efficient than their native counterparts so if anything you may end up using more local CPU time thanks to everything moving to the cloud :)

So I can't use this offline? And what happens under shitty network conditions?

Yeah. This might be a selling point for a service doing seriously CPU intensive calculations my computer might not find easy, but for a service editing the sort of documents my 1995 computer could handle it's a negative: the more stuff that's done exclusively on Amazon's servers the less it's handling intermittent connectivity issues by caching views and backing up my incomplete edits

You don't need a powerful browser. AppStream runs the app on a server and the client is just a thin client. https://aws.amazon.com/appstream/

Is this only for Windows apps with pixels and/or H.264 being streamed to an HTML5 web client? Why would Amazon base a new product on Windows (UWP?) instead of the web?

I don't know. Honestly I think the article is a shot in the dark.

As a medium scale business user (<50 employees) of Office365 at one of my companies, this is so much better than buying the old model of Office license that it's obvious this turns profitable. Between the always updated, the no up front payment, the ability to easily change your number of users, ... It's simply a superior solution in every way for me.

I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms going five years from now ?). Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still very much trust them for services I pay.

Are you talking about E1 plan or the one with desktop apps?

Our company got burned with the webapp nonsense pretty bad. We first tried Google docs which were woefully inadequate and buggy and slow, then we switched to the office webapps, which were no better until we finally returned to using desktop apps, and using a local IT service to stick a file server with raid and daily backups.

I can never understand how people tolerate webapps for anything serious.

The one with the desktop apps, we pay about 9 euros per user per month. For that price every user gets the latest version of word/excel/powerpoint, as well as a few others that we don't use. Updates are done automatically, and each user is allowed 5 simultaneous installs with their keys (desktop computer, work laptop, phone, ...). Agreed about webapp only offers, I would not buy office 365 for that. In fact we even make a point of removing One Drive because I have no trust in Microsoft with that.

For G-suite (google docs/sheets/... for business), I find it works great as an api store that also can give you direct access as sheets/docs/... Non tech people can create stuff (templates, models, stats ...) the way they're used too, and it's super easy to integrate automation into it while keeping everything in a format that Janice from accounting or Bob from support can access in real time with the doc/spreadsheet format they're used to.

I find it much better than office's offering for that. But they're definitely not two interchangeable solutions.

  always updated

... which is well-intended, but it scares me if that means that all of my installations have version updates at the same time without manual intervention or advance notification. What if there's a defect or an introduced fail in backward compatibility? I'd be dead in the water.

Can you designate phased updates such that managers/leads are updated first, followed by staged updates for the remainder (with manual on-demand update available, of course)?

In my experience, there is too little attention given to backward compatibility. Even we as customers are using a feature "incorrectly", it's still a problem if your legacy code base (or applications and documents, in the Office example) is broken by an unexpected update.

The last update, I was warned that an update would be rolled out to my users before it started. I don't remember how long of a delay I had, I am certain I could not schedule it to a time of my choosing BUT I could force it to happen right now on a user by user basis. Which is what we ended up doing so as to control our update time.

As for the backward compatibility, I agree in general but disagree about office, or particularly about word and excel. Its support for legacy stuff is insane, and a large part of why companies with lot of legacy stuff aren't moving to another solution anytime soon.

Anything proclaiming its going to "kill" some other business, likely isn't.

Google Docs is a great example of solving a problem that carved out a subsegment of Microsoft Office user base. I don't think any one solution is going to be the all encompassing one like Office has been.

Google Docs is great on a day-to-day basis. Has everything I routinely use and is very streamlined. And I'm fine with firing something else up when I get out of Google Docs' comfort zone.

Interesting, I'm guessing Amazon are doing this as they're concerned at Microsoft getting companies onto Azure as part of a package with Office365.

Articles like this one ( http://www.nasdaq.com/article/can-amazon-alphabet-catch-up-t... ) show that trend quite clearly

That said I'd think it'd be pretty tricky to get something that would compete with Office. Replicating the basic functionality is likely do-able, but the power user functionality of office can be pretty complex (e.g. Macros) and a lot of users are quite attached to it.

Sun failed to pull this one off when they attempted to turn StarOffice into a stick to beat MS. Yes, Google Docs have captured a lot of lightweight users. But it will be tough to persuade power MS Office users to switch, especially given the success of MS's switch to a subscription model.

I don't know. If you're part of an enterprise license, your goose is pretty much cooked...but for those small business and home users, I think that recurring monthly or yearly charge on the CC statement is going to make them a lot more willing to investigate alternatives.

Apple also made a run at Microsoft with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Apple is known for intuitive user interfaces and they had some great looking templates that made it easy to create professional documents. The problem is still compatibility with Office. If you're not 100% compatible with the office file format, you aren't going to seen as a viable alternative.

well, there's also a giant functionality hole, at least for Numbers vs Excel

I just gave a book to one of my friends. Can someone write an article about how I'm creating an "Amazon killer"

they should start with Excel ..

once they have a solid desktop excel replacement, that allow users to at least import their excel sheets and have 100% of the functionality that had in Excel, they have a Path, I think PowerPoint, Work, Access and Outlook are all a lot easier to give up compared to Excel

Excel is IT/Computers for many users

This is the key requirement for an 'office killer', but also the one all these challengers want to convince themselves they can get away without. I'm certain it would require a tremendous amount of labor.

Really, we need something better than Excel, which can bring Excel jockeys out of the weird ghetto of macros and into a true scripting environment. Google has made a valiant effort in this. But in order to get anyone who matters to even look at it seriously, you're going to need to offer compatibility, first.

Honestly, excel is so hard to use once the scale reaches a few hundred million that I was forced to build my own drastically scaled down version in order to support my data analysis. It's an interesting project, and the source code isn't too lengthy to get a reasonable amount of functionality.

I support a bunch of basic mathematic functions, and derived auto updating columns. I also have some ability to import and export common formats. I'd open source it but I don't want to open source my befunge interpretter which is essential to running my business.

Is this a late April Fools' joke? Your compiler for an esoteric programming language; "the design goal [for which] was to create a language which was difficult to compile"[1], is business-critical?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befunge

Not just business-critical, apparently it's a competitive advantage, such that he wants others to not be able to take advantage of it.

The goal is to reduce everything. Complexity is uncertainty, at some point we all throw up our hands and let the chips fall.

Every modern language compiles down to insane amounts of code. There is simply no way it's all correct, even at the compiler level. The legion of developers looking into it doesn't give me comfort either, because the size means it has to be partitioned at some point.

Competitive edges are essential in the modern information economy. This Bowling Alley succeeds or fails based on my own wits.

I mean, why not a relational database and some python or something instead of a custom program?

A lot my excel use cases are Pivot tables that connect directly to SSAS

excel is a client for the database, a very advanced client

Very true. Sometimes I think Microsoft really shoots themselves in the foot by not rapidly improving the performance of excel (GPU support would be killer). I really think many of the upstarts like Tableau would be completely sidelined by a higher performance excel with a few other features. I think to some degree the existence of PowerBI is basically Microsoft acknowledging they cannot iterate Excel fast enough to compete and thus need a fresh start. That said, I find it's one of the tools I miss the most when not on Windows.

People always underestimate how much work it would be to properly compete with Office. They tend to start with the view that 95% of users don't use 95% of the features. They're right, but have completely missed the point: in an enterprise environment those 5% will completely block adoption. In a bank, the 5% are the traders and the corporate financiers. Here's some Excel features that I would consider essential for those people:

* Named Ranges * Array Evaluation * Running a calc on all cores (and don't make me laugh by having your engine in JS) * Charting (Office's is honestly not that great, it's amazing how many alternatives are even worse) * UI Automation (doesn't have to be VBA) * Reuters/Bloomberg prices (this one is hard to achieve on your own, obviously)

And that's less than the minimum of what you'd need for the average bank to even _consider_ overcoming sunk costs, legacy implementations and sheer inertia. And I've only talked about one app in the office suite.

Being cheaper and easier to deploy frankly ain't going to cut it.

Ugh, I've worked at a few banks with a few diff trading desks and it is annoying how much they love Excel. Excel is such a horrible platform for anything other than some simple spreadsheets, but traders always find a way to work it in to some production system at which point it becomes impossible to remove.

Giving traders Visual Studio is actually remarkably effective...

There already is an "Office Killer", called LibreOffice. Does absolutely everything any small business or home user could ever need.

I like LibreOffice and I support it with donations too, but many people are already used to MS Office. And LibreOffice Calc, the one I use most, has big time usability problems and bugs. It doesn't have the same keyboard shortcuts as MS Excel. In fact, it chooses keyboard shortcuts that are very different from MS Excel, making usage even more cumbersome even though it hasn't adopted the Ribbon interface from MS and still has the standard pull down menus. It still doesn't have copy paste working well (sometimes, whatever I copy from another program cannot be pasted in it - this has been the case on Windows 7 and Windows 10 for at least a couple of years or longer across versions of LibreOffice 4.x/5.x). In my limited experience, there is no true competitor for MS Excel for those who have used MS Excel.

Amazon fundamentally does not understand UX. Office is too entrenched and Google Drive has great UX. This product is dead on arrival.

Spreadsheet functionality is not as intuitive or as seamless aaS as it is on the desktop for whatever reason.

I also expect that any product without an on-prem option is going to lose out in the enterprise space.

Google docs(drive) is already the online killer. So much better than office 365. I doubt amazon can outdo google here.

Of course they are, except that no one thinks that they will actually kill Office. I'm sure that they can attract some users, but killing Office...Not going to happen, and they are just using the notion as marketing for the "anything but Microsoft" crowd that also happen to be early adopters.

The real reason Amazon wants this is because they've seen Microsoft's cloud growth from productivity software has been incredible and they sell it along side their Azure offering. So far it's working, and AWS growth is slowing. The cloud is eventually going to be a war of margins, and the margin on productivity cloud software is more sticky than VMs, storage, etc.

It's also easier, imo to switch cloud providers than it is productivity providers, there's no retraining and the average users across your organization don't see the differences. A developer migrating a VM image and storage accounts is much less of a hassle than having to potentially get IT etc on board to retrain, answer questions, change user settings, deal with complaints about a missing function, etc.

Why? Amazon already has a great and successful business model, why not focus their efforts on expanding this model rather than trying to compete with Microsoft in an area where Microsoft has domain and market mastery? Say what you want about Microsoft, office is ubiquitous, their products are everywhere - so why spend money, time and effort trying to beat them at their own game rather than trying to expand their own core business.

I once heard this theory: that companies release a free product in another area (subsidized by their core business) in order to interfere with the monopoly of another company. For instance Google makes their money in search ads and has a free office suite and operating system. Microsoft makes their money from their office suite and OS, and undercuts google with Bing. Bing/Google Docs never really have to be #1, they just has to take enough market share that the other company can't ignore it when it comes to pricing.

I want Adobe to make a word processor and then an "operating system" by just pulling a Google and branding Linux; the only non-gaming software that seems to lock most people to Windows or macOS is Office/Work and "everything written by Adobe", and Valve is totally ready to jump ship and the lock in of DirectX is also dwindling in power... I think Adobe could pull it off.

See, I understand the wish to leave the windows lock-in behind, but I'm not sure the alternative really exists yet.

"Raw" linux, even the likes of ubuntu, is not ready for it, I'm not even sure it ever will be. No, I can't give my dad a linux box and expect him to read the upgrade instruction when his distro moves to system.d or whatever, and fix the likes of "can't update kernel because /boot is full". Of course to anyone who knows anything even remotely about it those are trivial non issues, but to my dad it's a complete show stopper.

On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use linux we have in android or chromeos, well, ... Sure, the code is a lot more open source and yada yada, but while I can do whatever I want on my windows box, I suddenly need to hope there is a way to root my own phone/tablet for lots of stuff. That is definitely not where I want my computer to go.

Disclaimer: I'm a happy windows user at home, and linux at work. And my phone is Android. I'm not bashing here.

Man I wish Palm hadn't flubbed the hardware and the geek community backed WebOS instead of Android. HTML/JS as a first class citizen, C++ to back it up, boot a kernel over USB, rooting directions printed on their developer website for everyone to see. It had such promise.

If only they hadn't spent a decade going circles producing nothing, it could have been. Just like Blackberry and Nokia could have provided entirely different phone ecosystem, if only they had woken up.

> On the other hand, the best example of widespread cleaned up easy to use linux we have in android or chromeos, well, ...

The new hybrid Android / ChromeOS systems like Samsung's Chromebook Plus are surprisingly useable as low-end laptops. Chrome is fully operational, and you have Google Docs. You also have the entire Android ecosystem, which gets you things like the Kindle reader. And I can confirm that Termux (https://termux.com/) works fine, so you can get a basic command-line without rooting the machine.

If you want a light, expendable travel system, or a gift for somebody who wants a computer that "just works", it's a surprisingly viable option.

Oh I don't mean they don't work, they work very well in my opinion. What I meant was that, while "open" as in open source is very important to us as developers, I feel like open as in "it's your computer and you do whatever you want with it" is just as important, and it's often a neglected criteria, and I feel this is one of the things where there is little if any competition to windows that is ready for prime time.

Hmm, I don't think you need to install anything on ChromeOS to have a shell[1] though your Chromebook does need to be in Developer Mode.

1: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/poking-around-your-chro...

Ha. Spend a few years supporting Adobe software and then come back to tell me you think they can pull off an operating system.

I'm sure the world would immediately trust an Adobe OS. They've done such a great job keeping Acrobat and Flash secure, after all.

Have you ever actually used any of Adobe's software? I'm an artist who uses Illustrator as her main medium and I am pretty sure I do not ever want to use AdobeOS.

I don't really understand the hatred among enthusiasts for Windows and an active longing for it to die. Every OS has its place, and Windows works best for productivity and consumer based usage.

I use Office at work. Through Microsoft's Home Use Program (HUP) I can buy a copy for home. As long as I can buy a copy for $9.95 -- I've bought the last four versions through HUP -- Amazon doesn't stand a chance. Neither does LibreOffice, even though I've installed it on a FreeBSD laptop and other computers.

The trouble with Amazon is everything that isn't their retail site has terrible UX so I'm not hopeful.

Their software also tends to be very crashy and/or slow. It's like Apple software for Windows, but worse.

I think the Kindles offer a pretty decent experience (even the Cloud Reader which I occasionally use).

Why?

So much for making presentations on the plane.

Seems like a futile venture.

There are bigger fish to fry.

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