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Comment by retrac98 | Hacker News Reader

I'll reserve judgement on office until I see it running, but this trend towards moving everything to web tech is a little worrying. So many of my "desktop" apps feel slow and bloated now, and I keep seeing instances of decent software being rewritten in JS. :(

I don't want my spreadsheets crapping out on me at a few thousand rows.

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Even though I never use outlook/ms stuff.

I like google google docs. The thing is, I rarely have to use them, so and it's been FOREVER since I've anything like libreoffice installed. So, in the case I have to handle a word document or spreadsheet, docs is good. I'd rather deal with a slightly slower web app rarely then having all the office suite stuff installed.

I was a big fan of google docs 10 years ago. But have lost interest as they have stagnated. Sheets is slow for anything over 100 rows compared to Excel and there’s a lot of 20% functionality that’s been missing for years in functions, charts, pivot, etc.

It’s great for lists, but I want an Excel clone on web. Fortunately, MS has been building this.

If MS ever simplified their license, I’ll switch.

What’s the complex part about their licensing? I thought it was a monthly subscription if you want upgrades or a one-time fee if you want the current version only.

They have commercial and non-commercial. Different features are active in different configurations.

The actual license is simple for office. I actually pay $100/year for my family. But almost every few months a new feature is announced only to learn that it’s only available for business. Or it’s not available for personal users. Stuff like that.

Google is dead simple. Everything free for personal use, but more storage space. Or business is $50/user/year/forever.

Google Docs is great until you want to use it in a low-netowork bandwidth or resource-constrained environment. That’s when you see how much of a resource hog it can be. (Offline Google Docs doesn’t really compare.)

> I don't want my spreadsheets crapping out on me at a few thousand rows.

Agreed. Besides the sheer lack of functionality of the web spreadsheets, the clipboard is a continual annoyance for me... 35 years of correctly working clipboard technology, and the more modern web based spreadsheets don't even get that right.

> this trend towards moving everything to web tech ...

Agreed... maybe Web technologies will eventually mature to the point where they're a competitive desktop application platform... but it's been 20 years so I'm not holding my breath.

At first I thought that they might be using Electron for each app which would concern me as well, but they are using React Native for almost every build except for win32 which will get Electron. I'm curious to see how React Native performs, especially on desktop, for such large scale applications like the office 365 suite. I'm cautiously optimistic

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