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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.

That combined with lack of innovative/unique features and a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95, and it is hard to argue why someone should use LO/OO instead of MSO. For example, what is the USP? Free is one, but is that the only one?

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> and a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95

How is that a drawback? That's a massive plus. The interface changes that we have seen in Office have been pointless time-consuming travesties with no real purpose but to make it look like the software is completely new. No productivity increases whatsoever. The LO interface hasn't changed since Office 95 because that's when it's peaked. The tasks are the same and the human that do them are the same, and so the interface (if it is already at its best version) should also stay the same. This a great advantage of the open source office suites, not a drawback.

In some regards, yes, but it's more than the structure of the UI. The menu-based interface should be perfectly suited to any task you want to accomplish, as it is in many other apps, but use LibreOffice for any amount of time and you begin to find the UI completely lacks any sort of consistency and tasks you'd expect to find under a certain hierarchy are not there, instead in a completely separate menu or toolbar that has nothing to do with it.

This is a problem with MSFT products as well, but to a lesser extent.

In addition, decades-old bugs have not been fixed. It's a showstopper.

> As an aside I really feel like LibreOffice had a lot of momentum back in the day, but when the whole OpenOffice/LibreOffice debacle occurred due to the Oracle purchase, the confusion of the branch (into LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) just pulled the rug out.

IMO, the concerted attack against the ODF format[1] was also a large contributing factor towards OpenOffice/LibreOffice loss in the format wars[2]

I posted about this in another thread and was down-voted for some reason[3], but I think it is important enough to not forget.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

[2] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2639468/odf-vs--openxml.ht...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21596347

Office 365 feels like a cheap beta test even on the biannual channels.

If not for corp legacy apps that mostly interface with outlook through old, partly deprecated and arcane APIs, a switch to anything could occur.

At home I use LO exclusively, even though I have the licences for MSO.

And the interface doesn't even hold anything against LibreOffice. The categories are completely random. Excel has some nice pivot visualization functions, but that is the only positive thing I can come up with when thinking of MS office.

I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space hasn't evolved since 20 years. And if autosave is one of those innovative features...

> I don't need office software to be that innovative, because the problem space hasn't evolved since 20 years.

Workflows evolve all the time. For example how many word processor competitors that target specific demographics are there (technical writing e.g. Markdown, authors e.g. Scrivener/Storyist, academics e.g. LaTeX, etc)? The problem space is evolving every day, LO/OO and even MSO haven't kept pace, but that doesn't mean things have remained static around them.

> Office 365 feels like a cheap beta test even on the biannual channels.

I’m in one or more Office 365 apps for most of my work-day. They work well and are stable, at least on macOS (which I assume gets less love than the Windows version).

In contrast, LO on macOS is a train wreck when it comes to stability and usability. It’s not competitive.

Ah, the good old "UI churn for the sake of it" argument, a.k.a. "It's $CURRENT_YEAR, people".

Office 97 was peak Office, UI-wise, for me and a whole lot of other users. If a UI works great, and newer UIs do not offer a clear, significant value add, why should it change? Why should not changing the UI count as a negative against the product?

I found the Ribbon a good evolution. Especially if you use plugins for Powerpoint and Excel. Once you have a few of those (and if you work in finance or management consulting it is easy to have 3 or 4 installed by default by your Company) the ribbon layout ensures a certain cleanliness of the toolbar.

> a UI that is essentially unchanged since Office 95

Back when I read slashdot, I swear every thread about office had a top comment complaining about how office’s ribbon UI ruined their work flow. One of the biggest weaknesses in open source is that the people who contribute to these projects seem to love 90s style UI.

Also Google Docs became more viable as a free (as in beer) alternative.

Agreed, free, and easy to use/cross platform.

MSO has somewhat pivoted towards mobile (Office Online, mobile apps). It is unclear if LO or OO have an "answer" for mobile devices, or if that's even in the realm of things they'd want to tacke?

If it's not, there's not much future for them. It's not even about mobile devices, but cross-platform compatibility. That's the biggest driver of Google Docs. Not that it's mobile friendly (although that helps), not that it runs in a browser (although that helps), but that it runs basically anywhere, and offers the same experience basically anywhere.

Even in enterprises, BYOD, VDI, and mobile devices are becoming a lot more popular. All it takes is one exec who says "this doesn't work on my preferred machine" and that whole product is axed from the entire company.

Getting OO/LO working online/mobile would be a big challenge for an open source team to undertake but I'd hate to see them fade away and lose an open source option.

LibreOffice Online has existed for 3 years at least, how come you've never heard of it?

That's a good point, how have I never heard of it? When I search in this entire thread your comment is the only reference I see to it.

I just took a second to look it up, and it doesn't seem to be competing with Google Docs or Office Online, since it's self-hosted and there are warnings all over that page to not use this software for production and it should only be used for development or personal use.

So it's good to know they're working on it. By their own admission it's not ready to be used, but it's good to know it's in-progress.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

Well, it is not perfect but actually quite usable. Unlike the competitors, it actually has the full power of a real LibreOffice under the hood, so the compatibility is much better what e.g. Google Docs can offer.

It's essentially fail of Apache Foundation. OpenOffice is essentially dead now (check the commits rate and piling unfixed bugs). The best they can do is to declare its decease, and link/redirect to LibreOffice instead.

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