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Comment by was_boring | Hacker News Reader

Yes, you can, but my question would be why would you want to? I don't know anyone personally who uses Office or Adobe for anything but work. Even then, the vast majority of professional use of Office is handled perfectly well by their online offering or Google's Docs.

Image manipulation and video editing are the only reasons I can think of someone would want something other than the hardware of a Chromebook. If Google opened up the Linux internals or made it dead simple to dual boot they would have a perfectly good development environment for web developers as well.

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>"Yes, you can, but my question would be why would you want to? I don't know anyone personally who uses Office or Adobe for anything but work."

Perhaps not people you know, but a lot of us enjoy drawing for fun. For me, at least, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator and a Wacom tablet is the best way to go if I want to do anything digital. Corel Painter is pretty good, too. Linux isn't a good option for any of these things.

Even then, the vast majority of professional use of Office is handled perfectly well by their online offering or Google's Docs.

In a lot of professional environments it is not. First of all, many employers do not like uploading documents into a cloud.

Secondly, in an organization that uses Microsoft Office (which is probably still the vast majority of organizations), it is often not a replacement. A lot of Office files (especially with macros, etc.) do not work properly. Colleagues expect you return a document with updates with Office's 'track changes' functionality ("here, you have a Google Docs link with my changes to your Word document" will not fly).

I think Microsoft still has a large advantage in big organizations, due to their traditional dominance. And Office 365/Exchange has added collaboration features as well (that work with Office on Mac and Windows).

> I think Microsoft still has a large advantage in big organizations, due to their traditional dominance

I agree, and in fact would extend it to dominance in entire industries where compatibility is key. I can imagine if a lawyer returned a 100 page M&A agreement via Google Docs they would be laughed out of the room and told to try again. Or an accountant sharing a company's entire set of financial statements in Google Sheets rather than Excel - same result.

Cloud collaboration offerings are fantastic tools in my opinion, particularly for lightweight idea sharing. I know Google has grand plans for its productivity suite, but I think it will be an uphill battle to de-throne Microsoft anytime soon due to its widespread acceptance in a lot of industries as the "standard".

This is my experience of tooling up for a new job, I'm building a fast developer desktop which will be running Linux but we still had to sort out a license for Windows and Office (which will be virtualised) because while I can do my job completely on Linux the rest of the company is stuck emailing spreadsheets and stuff around.

I can't see that changing for a long time, I think people continue underestimate how hard it is for average adults in the workplace to jump around platforms, we are programmers (mostly) we are comfortable picking up new software and platforms as and when we need them but it's a classic case of "what applies to me applies to everyone".

That 50yo who is awesome at his job but 'useless' (by our metrics) with computers is still awesome at his job.

Emailing documents around seems like a recipe for errors, conflicts, and confusion around which version is the correct one. Does that really work well?

Work - sorta (with enough thrust a brick will fly) - well absolutely not but it's also prevalent in just about every office I've ever worked near.

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