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Comment by bobds | Hacker News Reader

"I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

We now have Google entering your market and offering a better product for free.

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Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS. The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads. Not to mention much of the world still runs offline whereas Google assumes de facto connectivity in most things they do.

Of course where search, mail,browser and android are concerned, Google has done an excellent job, but for productivity software MS is still the king.

I was referring to the fear, not the actual products. If Google entering your market doesn't scare you, you are either a fool or lucky to be in a defensible position.

The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads.

And in exchange get a system where when your non-tech-savvy friend breaks their computer their data is still safe waiting for them?

Or when they want to send you a document they just press the share button?

Google Docs and MS Office are very different products, but saying Docs is inherently worse ignores the benefits provided by a web based system that Office just can't provide.

> Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS.

For many it is, for others it's insufficient. But: "do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

The only reason we have MS Office at work is Exchange and Outlook, and that's because we dogfood a component of the service we're providing to our customers. Everything else is taken care by OOo/LO and we have a Google Apps around (used mostly for XMPP) but that one would be put to full use the moment we drop Exchange.

Agreed with offline though.

And discontinuing it a year later.

haha

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