Comment by nestorD
7 hours ago
My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right. But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of software that do everything, I can build the components I need, customized for my use case, and move on.
Does that actually work with Office tools? Like yes you can make your own documents and spreadsheets. But what about when you receive something from someone else? Or need to send it back after doing your edits? Do the files still work correctly?
Big part of the value is in true interoperability...
I don't think the best path towards interoperability is to run after those who based their entire business model on making interoperability a problem in the first place.
If I were to create an office suite that cares for interoperability, it would be based on markdown and CSS, viewable in the terminal, one could `grep` and `sed` and `git diff` through it, LLMs could read and write it natively, ... But I'm afraid it'll take another 40 years until we're there.
RTF exists.