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Comment by TheCondor | Hacker News Reader

MS's Office collaborative cloudish stuff is a prime example of this.

I don't know how many times my team has ganged up on a document in Google Cloud and collaboratively banged it out. Likewise, I can only remember a couple times I've done it with Office and not ended up with n different copies of the doc that we had to manually merge back together, if we even could.

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Office on the web actually does this really well now. The desktop app is a little more glitchy, but Google doesn't even have one of those. I really like tracked changes in Word on the web. Microsoft has come a real long way in the last three years.

Does this include products like Word Online? Because that product is awful.

The visual bugs are annoying and the document-syncing with multiple editing people feels like 2005. As of last year, it couldn't even render a .docx file properly. It tried to render input fields as images. LibreOffice Writer opened the doc better than /Word/ Online.

I am a student who has access to office online and have tried to encourage my peers to use it for group projects so that we don't have to use Google. However after repeatedly having to make up excuses for their neglected product, I have given up and just request anonymous editing links for Google Docs.

I won't touch any web app because I'm perfectly fine using my Vimium shortcuts that I don't need them to interfere with a web app that could have been just a native app...

Completely different experience for me. The desktop app is solid (although latest patches made it unstable + the visual change is just not good), but the collaboration tools are horrible to use.

You dont know where files are saved, you cannot connect a file to a file, lots of options seem to be disabled (e.g. collaborative Excel on Teams).

> Office on the web actually does this really well now.

Did you miss an /s? I just tried using this again and it's slow and buggy. Office has a lot of advantages, but collaborative document editing is not one of them.

You must have been using an old version of MS Office, or had it improperly configured. We use Office for real time collaboration on documents all the time. You can put a file on SharePoint, then have multiple users edit live using a mix of desktop, mobile, and web applications. The changes are immediately visible and this doesn't create different copies.

Can confirm.

> You can put a file on SharePoint

Everyone else just lets you multi edit without the steel-trap lock-in layer.

Who is everyone else? Google locks you in just as much as Microsoft.

How does Google lock you in when you could just export it as docx and move over anytime to Word/Libre?

You can even bulk download as many docs you like and there's even takeout.google.

You can also export files from Microsoft products. There is no difference in vendor lock in between Google and Microsoft.

The question is how do you export and use metadata from sharepoint that is useful? Documents are not where the lock in is.

Microsoft Office, Teams, and SharePoint have comprehensive APIs so you can export any metadata you want. It's no different from competing Google products in that regard.

Developer work is expensive and beyond most users abilities. File..save is not. It is very different.

You can do File, Save As in the Microsoft products as well. There's no significant difference.

MS Office is actually a counter example of this. It was much worse than Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, and WordPerfect. They crushed the competition because of vampiric sales strategies.

Early versions of the individual Microsoft Office products might have lacked some features compared to competitors. Their real innovation was building an integrated suite with consistent user experience. That was tremendously valuable to casual users.

Microsoft certainly did some shitty things in terms of unethical and monopolistic sales practices, but their competitors also made some amazingly stupid strategic errors. In particular WordPerfect was slow to port their product to Windows. And when they finally did, they kept it too similar to the legacy MS-DOS version which was poison for gaining new sales.

They crushed the competition, because competition management was quite bad with their decisions, a good example of their bad decisions was sticking to MS-DOS until it was too late.

Word for Windows was NOT worse than WordPerfect. WordPerfect continued using their primitive inline codes after GUIs were the norm.

Word integrated an entire programming language (WordBasic), with which you could not just create macros, but entire applications complete with dialog boxes. I used WordBasic to add features to Word years before they were offered, such as page numbering that spanned documents.

That's being too kind. Just doing regular WORD PROCESSING with Word now is a shambolic, pathetic experience.

Then there's the lost-in-the-weeds, defect-riddled shitshow that is post-XP Windows.

Microsoft's #1 priority now is hounding the shit out of you to LOG IN WITH YOUR MICROSOFT ACCOUNT!

Up yours, Microsoft. Nobody wants your stupid account; we have WAY too many already.

A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave

Josh from the Game Helpin' Squad actually tries to get some work done. Or, rather, he complains about how people didn't appreciate it when he got some work done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z4RKRLaSug

"Google Buzz: Like Twitter, But With Bees"

"I've Got A Bad Feeling About This" Button

"The Third Time's The Button" Button

It is also interesting to see what designers actually think about the future of Figma. I think, the market is always in move. https://youtu.be/hDHByVS2I6Q

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