Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewisjoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the business of building a word processor.

Besides OpenOffice, there is generally reduced downloads of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. This is not surprising.

The world is moving past system-installed, standalone editors, saving them into a file and exchanging them over emails. The convenience that comes with editing, sharing and collaborating right from the browser is picking up speed, and it's a good thing. We have unlimited version history and the social features (comments, reactions and data tables, with ratings and upvotes as column types like in Coda / Notion) is unmatchable with what a traditional word processor can offer.

The world is evolving into a different future of Office apps and Apache's projects don't fit into that ecosystem.

View on HN

It’s NOT a good thing. I want to own my documents and not have to worry about some cloud provider mining them to sell data about me, or just disappearing one day.

Sure I can see the cases where the collaboration is useful, but there are many, many more cases where it’s not needed and cloud introduces far more risk than reward.

It’s also hard to beat the UX available to native applications that are dedicated and purpose-built and locally processing rather than an interpreted language wrapped inside a web browser constantly communicating with a server somewhere as I type.

I really hate online document editors.

How many documents do you actually own, but still write them in a full-out word processor? Personally, if it's just for me, I use .txt files. Word processors are too much friction for personal notes.

The only cases where I want sophisticated formatting features are for other people's documents, which means it's their business to pick the format. They don't always pick Office 365. Sometimes it's Confluence, or a company-branded tool that I don't even know what it actually is, or Zoho, or G Suite.

Between running some random word processor that someone else picked for me in my browser, and giving it unrestricted access to my home folder (or having to fiddle around to get it running in a container of some sort), I prefer the browser.

I definitely prefer the browser over imposing a monoculture on word processors. Not so much because I think there's much room to innovate in text editing itself (I often enough copy-and-paste between web-based word processors and Sublime Text), but because of the opportunity to innovate in the data model.

Few regular folk need to share documents and businesses will use name brand word processors for collaboration rather than some unknown, new variation. You're wasting your time, IMO.

no, get your social crap out of my spreadsheets damnit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com