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Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

> RFP responses

This might as well just be a PDF. The source format shouldn't matter if the recipient is just going to read it.

> architecture descriptions, requirement definitions

A hierarchical plain text document (biasing towards Org if you want internal links) would satisfy the same use case and play much better with source control.

> Using a database and scripting is overkill for 90% of things and is just over-engineering a problem that spreadsheets already solves well and are understood by the people who are meant to read them.

It's not a binary. I don't particularly like Python or SQLite, but I'd take a couple of quick and dirty Python+SQLite scripts over a bunch of unstructured spreadsheets any day.

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All of those things are collaborative. Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown.

Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.

> All of those things are collaborative.

Indeed. So why on earth would you pay for tools that make all version control systems barf?

> Project managers aren't going to learn how to edit those documents. Sales guys aren't going to start including their bits with markdown and the marketing team isn't going to fiddle with images in markdown.

It's not that hard. Ask a random nine-year-old to come up with a formatting syntax and they'd likely come up with something with a canny resemblence Org.

> Its a solved problem, I don't see why you would want to engineer so much around such simple tasks for the only reason seemingly to be not using Microsoft.

Why would you use a overcomplicated WYSIWYG editor to make a few things bold and add a list? Why would you pay for that miserable experience?

Ask a random nine-year-old to create a Word document. If triviality is your concern, everyone is at some point required to learn Word. It is quite literally one of the first software anyone in the US is introduced to. You are absolutely guaranteed to encounter it at some point K-12 or and in college. Random markdown syntax and git, not so much. The idea that you are going to dictate how you communicate to and share with the rest of your organization (sales, marketing, compliance, legal) because of an affinity for software related tooling is laughable.

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