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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

User experience?

I use proprietary office suites (both Office 365 and Apple Pages) because they’re much more intuitive and pleasant to use than the free alternatives.

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Yes. Most of the time people don't get that behind these products there are very well paid and perhaps world's best designers and engineers - many of them.

So these paid products more often than not would be much more superior in terms of experience.

This might be the case, but commodity convenience and software pleasantness is probably the least important thing what should be taught and learned in school.

Apple's suite of "office"-type apps is wonderfully lightweight, yet pretty full-featured. Reminds me of using some of the lighter Open/Libreoffice alternatives on Linux, like Gnumeric, except, you know, nicer looking, easier to use, more featureful, less buggy, and with much better templates and such.

Apple's supporting apps generally are a big part of what keeps me on the platform. They're consistently more resource (including battery) friendly than any alternative with a comparable featureset, rarely or never crash[0], work seamlessly with my mobile devices, et c. Hell Preview alone would be hard to give up. What a gem of a program.

[0] Excepting Xcode, obviously :-)

Until 5 years ago, I'd have agreed with you. LibreOffice is pretty straight-forward these days though. "Straight-forward" trumps "featureful" for me.

Increased usage would likely lead to more UX improvements, but people don't want to use something not as slick as Word and Pages. Chicken and egg.

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