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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Were they? My recollection is that software back then had more features. Software today is neutered in comparison. (Compared Google Docs to Word Perfect from the early 1990s).

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Think about Windows and how easily it was to change settings, you went to the control panel. Now in Windows 10 you have dig around to find things. It's like they are trying to hide stuff.

No, they're just maintaining two separate interfaces for everything.

Are you sure about that Google Docs comparision? It can be edited at the same time by multiple people in a seamless way. Did Word Perfect do that?

Of course it did. You just had multiple people sitting at the computer. :-P With a KVM-sharing switch if you wanted to be fancy about it.

That's a smart alec answer, but there's a bit of truth to it - back in the 80's when WordPerfect had its heyday, there wasn't a better answer. The Internet was still barely out of research labs, computers were slow and memory was very limited. Video calling was still the realm of science fiction.

Google Docs isn't a great example. In WordPerfect's case, WordPerfect was the product and there was an incentive to make it great.

Google Docs isn't the product. It's free. You're the product. And it only needs to be good enough to keep competitors from creating something so great that it removes their first-mover advantage. It's clear that Google has given up developing new features for it.

A solid portion of Docs users are paid G Suite users.

Grammar checking on Google docs had gotten wicked smart.

I can only remember a single time the bad grammar marker on google docs wasn't hilariously wrong, contorting a perfectly normal sentence into something weird. And that one time it was catching a doubled word.

One of the nice things about GSuite (for me) is that it implements a nice spectrum of features that many people need without a lot of other stuff. I certainly get that some people need that other stuff whether sophisticated revision tracking, pivot tables, etc. But for my regular but generally unsophisticated use of GSuite, it's better than anything I've used in years.

[ADDED: And as other have mentioned while the collaborative editing of Google Docs doesn't scale all that well, it's a great remote collaboration tool. Never want to go back to sending docs around.]

I actually never much cared for WordPerfect with all its formatting codes and so forth. I was actually a bigger fan of early DOS-based Microsoft Word at the time.

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