Hacker News Reader

Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point, I wouldn't recommend it. Spending 10 USD per user/month on Microsoft 365 is a small investment but it gives most users instant familiarity with the tools and provides you with tools for collaboration (drafting contracts for instance). I don't think you can save money if you look at training effort alone. In the worst case you will be seen as hard to integrate (and hence buy) as a company because of a weird office stack.

View on HN

> Since you are a start-up and thus likely seeking an exit at some point

I don't believe your conclusion follows the premise -- I'm not planning my business around an exit strategy, and we're gunning for being a large, private company not just a quick money spinner.

As I've said elsewhere, it's also not about cost, but about open tools and an open ecosystem. I use LibreOffice myself (I run Linux, as do about a quarter of my engineering team) and find it fine (except for complex models and spreadsheets).

I get your point about Open Source, no problem.

In your intro you mentioned a series A funding and so I imagined the typical start-up which goes maybe to 50-500 employees before exit (or bust). If you are gunning to be a next RedHat or strongly driven by a Open Source strategy, I get why you would strategically invest in being a pure Open Source shop. If Linux drives your business then it is fine to go this way. Otherwise: The office stack is not a core part of your business so go with the thing that causes the least amount of friction in your company for a modest price.

Yeah, I am curious why the OP is wanting to avoid Microsoft here. It is one thing if you just want to use open source and maintain that ethos, but if the reason is to save money it makes no sense. Spending $400 a month for a 40 person startup is going to be a negligible cost. If it adds even a few hours a month of extra effort across your entire team, the cost savings are already gone.

Use the thing everyone knows.

To be clear (as many people seem to think this is about money): this isn't about money. If we switched to LibreOffice we'd donate to the contributors and pay for support. This is about migrating tools before I have double the number of people to migrate.

Why do I want to look at LO?

- GSuite: it's just terrible, the entire suite misses basic functionality (custom styles, anyone?) and it only works online for me, and there are no files I can access. When Google went down for a day no-one could access a single document or presentation, which is just untenable.

- MS Office: better than GSuite, but the latter has better collaboration tools IMO. I like Office just fine, but it's not OpenSource, and I'm on Linux which means there are no offline apps I can use.

- LibreOffice: it's open-source, with an open document format. If we don't start using (and paying for) open-source projects as business they'll never become sufficiently competitive, and I prefer an open ecosystem to a closed one.

Unfortunately Office is no longer "the thing everyone knows." It has become a hideously dysfunctional mess, primarily because of UI-design defects.

Style management stands as a particular example. Now you must wade through dozens of unwanted canned styles to find the ones you've set up... if I remember correctly.

For the style mess and other UI regressions that I haven't taken the time to catalog, I switched to LibreOffice. Granted, I don't exchange Office documents with coworkers much. We use (also crappy) Confluence for most documentation; and if I just want to send a document to someone, I export to PDF.

I used to love Word. I used WordBasic to automate not only technical-documentation production, but also to parse and rewrite thousands of SQL routines on a DEC VAX system and save my company weeks of engineering time.

I hate Word now because Microsoft ruined its UI. Oh, and I detest the continual hounding to log into your "Microsoft account." Nobody wants your goddamned account, Microsoft. We all have PLENTY of accounts by now.

Personally, I’ve found the new UI in Word to be a massive improvement. The ribbon is way easier for me to navigate and find functionality.

Then again, I’m using the macOS version. It still has a menubar for less common functionality.

I think it depends on what kind of user you are. If you're doing ad-hoc formatting all the time, maybe the ribbon is OK. But if you are used to managing styles and religiously applying them and using templates, I found that the new UI sucks (on both Windows and Mac).

The "ribbon" was widely mocked when it came out; I'm curious as to what you find easier about it.

I wasn't a big Word user prior to the ribbon so I can't compare before and after, however I've found applying styles about as easy as it can be (select text, click the style in the ribbon). Were they in a more convenient location before?

There was always a style drop-down in the toolbar. My experience goes back to Word for Windows (named thusly to differentiate it from the DOS version). Check it out: https://www.idgcdn.com.au/article/images/750x750/dimg/m_img_...

It's the management and use of styles that I find has regressed drastically. When I press the Style drop-down, I want to see only MY styles. I don't want to scroll through a shitload of canned styles that Microsoft has laden the application with, featuring every variety of color and thickness of underline. The last time I tried Word (not that long ago), there was no way to get rid of this huge pile of crap.

Word peaked at version 6, I think. Is there anything important missing from this toolbar? https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/applications/microsoft-...

I've been fortunate enough that the canned styles have worked for my requirements but I can definitely see how they won't work for every case.

If Word had styles prior to the ribbon, I didn’t know about it.

I imagine very few people knew they existed.

The review ribbon has been very convenient. I use it constantly as an author.

Flipping between landscape and portrait and changing margins isn’t buried in an obscure dialog box. (I do this often to make signs.)

OK, I could see how review controls would be useful. Could they not be added to the toolbar before?

With due respect to your opinion, I don't think sign-making is a major use case for a word processor. I would think that a vector-art program would be far better suited to that, even a free one like Inkscape.

The ribbon interface is more than just buttons on a toolbar. It adds discoverability to many features I didn’t even know existed and I’ve used Word since Office 95. I find the differing visual layout to be a lot easier to read than a lot of similarly sized buttons.

Any place where people work will end up having signs. I’ve seen Word (and Google docs) used to make simple text signs and more complex ones using clip art. What I don’t see is a lot of signs being made. Not nearly enough to justify learning Inkscape.

I use Office on a Mac as well, i have zero issues with the UI and UX on the recent versions.

The thing that everyone knows these days is Google Docs, not Office.

Only in a very small, insular bubble.

I don't know, I've worked with tiny startups and bigger companies like Red Hat, and huge banks, and GSuite is very widely used. The biggest corps don't seem to use it, but I definitely don't think it's only used in a small insular bubble

According to my Google Research Google Workspace has 19.2% marketshare and Office 365 65%.

I wouldn't call 20% "a small insular bubble".

As the the children using it in schools grow up the percentage will probably change in Googles favour. Cheap Chromebooks and G-suite for schools was the entry to try breaking Microsoft monopoly on an Office suite we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.

> we will find out if they succeeded in the next decade.

I'm worried that Google ADHD strikes Workspace, to be honest the reason many still stick up with Microsoft is that they understand the proposition of enterprise software, but assuming Google didn't touch Workspace like it did for its messaging and payment solutions it could be a 50/50 split.

I don't know a single person in the company I work for that use MS Office or has done the last three or so years.

Supposedly you can get a license if you need it, but I don't know anyone who need it or even complain about it.

Everything goes in Confluence (or.md files in repos) or something similar these days, doesn't it?

Most other startups I know use GSuite.

The fresh-off-the-line uni grads I talk to are still doing Office training as a first year course.

I have never heard of a college course about Microsoft Office at a university in the US. And I went to college in early to mid 2000s.

Colleges offer entire degree programs in using Microsoft Office software. You can get an Associate's degree just in that alone.

I've never been to a college that didn't require one Office course for all graduates.

I think maybe people are talking at cross purposes here and using the word 'college' differently, because I (in the USA) never even heard of a college that offers such a course, much less requires it.

I am also in the US. I'd have to dig up details on the "Office class" I had to take, but for example, here's a two-year college in my area's Office program: https://cod.edu/academics/programs/ofti/index.aspx

FWIW, I'm Australian, and I'm talking about our local Universities. Doing a BSc myself, Msft Office training wasn't a requirement for my course, but many of the Bachelor of IT courses did have it as a requirement. Talking to my colleagues, they also had it as a requirement.

FWIW, I'm Australian, and have never heard of such a requirement.

Swinburne seems to offer such courses, but they're not credited, and not compulsary, and they're one day things designed for students who have never even turned on a computer before. They're definitely not part of a Bachelor of IT.

MelbUni, VicUni and FedUni don't even offer anything like that, at all.

I guess I’m talking about 4 year liberal arts colleges when I say or think “college”.

Depends on the field. I think the main sticking point is Excel, a large number of businesses still rely on Excel-specific features.

I wouldn't want to have anyone on my team who couldn't pick up either in a few days. An average user isn't expected to run some complex analysis or create complex dashboards.

The maximum weirdness I have seen:

"I think your tabstops are inconsistent."

Granted, I don't do complex spreadsheet formatting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com