Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

We simply don't apologise for jumping ship from MS Word. For us, the productivity gains have been irresistible.

That's awesome. I wish I could. I'm a technical writing consultant who does grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (www.seliger.com if you're curious), and everything we get from clients and public agencies is a Word or Excel file. Everything we send out has to be in the same formats.

We're in a situation similar to the graphic designers and photographers and so on who say that everything they take in and send out has to be Photoshop / InDesign / etc. compatible. The industry has standardized around these programs and formats and perfect compatibility is mandatory.

LibreOffice is great. I've mentioned it in class (I adjunct on the side), but I can't use it.

Microsoft Office hasn't really evolved in 10 years, and even when it did (in 2007), it hasn't really evolved for the better.

I do think that there is a window opened for a competitor to disrupt this monopoly.

There WAS a window, but I think it's closed already though. Google Docs and a host of Office-compatible Android/iOS apps made a go at it, and they made headway for a while. But Microsoft went ahead and made web and Android/iOS versions of Office that are at least as good as Google Docs and the various Office for Android apps I've seen, with far better Office compatibility than anyone else can offer (since they're running the same code as desktop Office under the hood).

Meanwhile LibreOffice is fighting the last war, with a thick desktop client using some custom cross-platform GUI toolkit that looks native on exactly nothing, no web app version and no real effort on mobile[1]. And it's fighting the last war badly at that -- not even people who write articles about switching to LibreOffice can actually switch to LibreOffice because they keep Word around for compatibility with everyone else in the world. Calc versus Excel is in even worse shape than Writer versus Word.

1) There IS an Android version of OpenOffice:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.collabora....

It's read-only and the UI is... subpar, however.

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