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Comment by candyman | Hacker News Reader

Given how precious and valuable time is I don't really get the aversion to using Microsoft or something similar. Pricing has come down so much that it's less than people spend on coffee. If you are working on something worthwhile it doesn't seem worth the effort to avoid using mainstream, productive and cheaply available commercial software.

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Downloading and using LibreOffice is the quickest way to start working. It is literally a one click download no outlook.com email creation required or payment or license to review.

For majority of users the features office provides is a waste of their time.

I don't mind M$ Office, but a small proportion of the team (including me) use Linux. I have no aversion to paying (we pay Google, for example) but I like open source, would like to contribute (financially) to LibreOffice or whoever is relevant if we do go down that path, and think that the only way this stuff gets mainstreamed is if companies, y'know, mainstream it.

It is not about price.

The usage experience on MSOffice is unpleasant enough to motivate seeking an alternative.

I think this is purely subjective. I never hear regular users (read: the non-technical user) complain about office. They tend to complain when something doesn’t work like office does.

Folks in tech tend to be more worried about UI and UX and frankly tend to be nit picky when something doesn’t look or work like they would have designed it.

In other words, the more ignorant someone is, the better they like it. That is not exactly a glowing endorsement.

But…are they ignorant? I’d argue that your UI/UX is successful if your lowest common denominator user likes it and finds it comfortable to use.

I have seen a lot of software products fail over my career that was designed by developers who created UI that they liked and thought was the pinnacle of interface design. Users hated it. Most devs don’t think like regular users.

I, also, have seen plenty of failed UIs designed by ignorant, inexperienced devs.

Complaining that something is wrong because it differs from MS demonstrates just such ignorance. Users not understanding that something could be different from MS and therefore better is how we got here.

Ultimately adoption is all that matters. If your new and better interface isn't an obvious game changer to the lowest common denominator user of your product to get them to see the value and not long for their comfort zone, it’s not really new and better.

Ultimately a UI and UX needs the “U”

We all know that ignorance and inertia carry markets. That is not the topic.

If you rarely use a hammer, but change the way a hammer operates, claim it’s better, but the folks who use hammers everyday all day disagree, it’s not the hammer users who are ignorant.

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