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Comment by 202508042147 | Hacker News Reader

202508042147·

MS advantage over Google docs was exactly what US cloud providers have over everyone else: lock-in.

I mentioned MS because OOXML is now an open standard, albeit a 6000 pages one, but still open. And a similar sized competitor - Google, is still trying to deliver the same functionality.

The point I'm trying to make is that going from zero to hero, even with basically "infinite" money like Google has is very very very hard.

I’m not sure it’s necessary. Office is bloated with features that very few people use on rare occasion. A much simpler word processor would do, and the next Google Docs doesn’t need to invent a lot of this stuff from scratch.

The tricky part is how many organizations have an enormous amount of business logic programmed into excel sheets.

I think you're underestimating the features used within Office. Offices isn't bloated because they wanted to add fluff. It's bloated because of the large number of customers that have differing but overlapping needs.

The Engineers: Word processor with basic features is fine

Management and Execs: Comments, Review, Multi-user editing, History, Tables, change tracking.

Marketing: Image placement and alignment, layers, embedding, templates, shapes

Research/Doc Writers: Table of contents, page numbering, cross-referencing, formula insertion, citations, figure tables, export to pdf

All customers (at some point): Layout, margins, padding, spellcheck

As engineers we tend to think "just deliver a simple word processor". For who?

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