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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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%.

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.

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.

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