Comment by charlie-83
2 days ago
I guess I wasn't really thinking about it in the context of jobs since the post was about kids. I was thinking about the kinds of "non-techie" people I often help with computer stuff (often older people). They don't even know what the cloud is, they just want to have a spreadsheet for monthly expenses, make a document or two to print out and an occasional presentation. There are a huge number of these kinds of people but they don't really generate money as a market segment so MSOffice has completely abandoned them. Those people do sometimes need to open a file someone else made in MSOffice but LibreOffice compatibility is good enough for their purposes.
> I guess I wasn't really thinking about it in the context of jobs since the post was about kids.
The primary reason kids would use office tools is for classwork, which is not dissimilar from job work.
If you're submitting a book report or something it doesn't matter what you're using to write it. However, once you get into group projects (which are very common, in my experience) being the odd one out who can't work with others is really not good.
Kids also learn how to use computers at most schools. They're probably exposed to some combination of MS Office and/or Google Docs products already.