Comment by stby
1 day ago
I actually quite like the UI of MS Office, but nevertheless I don't understand why so many competitors try to make clones. Say what you want, but MS has a huge head start here and everyone else is just making worse looking copies of the way MS Office looked years ago.
And of course, is this really the final form of office applications? Is it maybe time to just go back to the drawing board, think about workflows, the current state of technology, future trends, and build a UI that works maybe even better, looks cleaner, fits on more screens?
If your software can look and work pretty similar to what Microsoft Office does but be cheaper or even free at the same time - there’s a market for this type of stuff
The problem being, one of the biggest hurdles for any office suite that isn't Google's or Microsoft's is adoption, and one way to mitigate that is making a clone
The nerds will send you a PDF generated from a LATEX file, but most office workers in the world don't care enough to figure out why the shortcuts they memorized 20 years ago don't work in 'weird word' or their formulas break on 'weird excel'
This is it. I daily drive Linux at my current job but worked with Excel for a decade at my precious jobs and it's incredibly annoying to have to stop my workflow and figure out where LibreOffice hid the menu option for things I have hotkey memory for in Excel. Yes I know they're not the same, but I honestly don't care, I just want to create a table and sort by a column so I can move on to my DevOPS tasks.
>the current state of technology, future trends
An AI office suite startup has taken long enough to appear.
That’s actually what I like about Apple Numbers… it’s not trying to be Excel.