This is going to be very true right up until it isn't.
Yeah, I know that sounds fake-deep but we've seen this before; I'm old enough to remember when WordPerfect was the standard that wasn't going anywhere.
It will just be one of those inflection-point thingies.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I did want to point out that a big part of what made it possible for Word to displace WordPerfect in the legal world was, literally, the fact that Word implemented full support for WordPerfect's file format including all sorts of weird quirky edge cases.
So, an analogous "Word-killer" today would presumably have to implement all of the docx format's weird quirks etc. On the one hand, the file format is standardized and open, so in principle that should be possible; on the other hand, it's a pretty gnarly file format, with a lot of nooks and crannies. Ironically, I remember hearing once that some of the weirder nooks and crannies of the docx format have their roots in... Word's WordPerfect interoperability features.
And as somebody who recently spent far more time than he expected to trying to reliably get data _out_ of a set of mildly-complicated docx files, I can report that the various fiddly details that the OP notes as being particularly important in the legal domain --- very specific details of paragraph formatting, complex table structures, etc. --- are a huge PITA to deal with when working with the docx format.
Yes, exactly. A successor could theoretically replace Word, but first it needs to replicate all of its existing functionality.
For a competitor to supplant Word, it would need to:
- Be fully backwards compatible with .docx. Lawyers will inevitably receive .docx files from counterparties that they need to review, redline, and mark up. The new processor has to handle everything Word does flawlessly. (As an engineer who has spent considerable time building a high-quality docx comparison engine, I can tell you this is tremendously difficult.)
- If it introduces a new file format, support seamless comparison and conversion between that format and .docx. Not technically impossible, but also tremendously difficult with marginal upside.
- Defeat the Microsoft Office bundle in the market — meaning it either offers enough advantage that organizations pay for both, or it replaces Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook too.
Given the enormous challenge of building a viable Word competitor and the marginal room for improvement that Microsoft has left on the table, I think it's very unlikely that a competitor will threaten its market position.
As the US government becomes more erratic and untrustworthy it will encourage large organisations to look for alternatives to American software and services.
The stated intent of the US National Security Strategy is to destabilise and undermine Europe. That is a big incentive for European organisations to replace Windows, Office, and any other Microsoft service.
Linux and LibreOffice usage will grow as a direct consequence of the US government's new antipathy to Europe.
Imo, as long as companies are paying for E3 licenses, they won't pay for another solution. And they'll be paying Microsoft for licenses as long as they have Active Directory, right? Seems like the whole Microsoft ecosystem is built on AD (and probably Excel too)
> And they'll be paying Microsoft for licenses as long as they have Active Directory, right?
They'll be paying long beyond on-prem AD as well. EntraID is becoming the new identity system. If you're already on E3/E5, you might as well make use of it, and making most use of it means being stuck in the whole Microsoft ecosystem.
Why bother looking for alternatives, even if one particular product might be better, when Microsoft gives you literally everything at at least a mediocre level, for one price and pre-integrated.
>Why bother looking for alternatives, even if one particular product might be better, when Microsoft gives you literally everything at at least a mediocre level, for one price and pre-integrated.
This is exactly why we switched from Zoom to Teams
Yes, AD is the value proposition. Your employees can get cloud-synced, multi-user real-time editing of documents. This is what kills the "but my Linux app can do it for free."
It runs on-premise, has all kinds of certificates and has a history of half a cenutry (give or take.) That kills Google Docs.
It's cross-paltform, killing whatever Apple thinks it has.
Too many people think Word is a text editor. I'd use Notepad++ if it had full AD integration. But it doesnt.
> It's looking like Windows will be more of an issue here than anything in Office.
And even then, Microsoft will be happy because even if Windows were to dissappear tomorrow, people would still be buying Microsoft 365 licenses and just using the very same tech and app stack from their mac.
Ever read something that's so mind-bogglingly stupid that you have to pause and wonder (even now) if you're the stupid one?
That's me right now.
Okay, let me walk through it. I think what's going on here is an extreme double-fallacy: The idea that (1) there is a fixed supply of money (2) that consistently and fairly translates to spending power.
Both of these things are wildly wrong, rendering this article pure idiocy.
Oh, AI could hurt the concepts of "apps" badly and still be good for people.
Strong chance that the push in innovation in this space doesn't get reflected in "apps sold or downloaded," and in fact hurts this metric (and perhaps people buying and selling code in general) -- but still results of "people and organizations solving their own problems with code."
Right - I'm wondering why this article is so important and maybe I haven't seen enough intrusive "smart" TV's -- but is it not the case that for the vast majority of smart TVs, you can still just connect whatever to the HDMI (e.g. a computer) and keep it on that? Mine are Roku's, but I feel like the Samsungs et al are the same?
The point is what if you DON’T just connect something to bypass all the slowness. Maybe in a tech forum everybody has done it, but certainly not out in the “real world”.
While we're here, let me go ahead and once again give much praise to https://zim-wiki.org , my daily driver for most things in my life.
It was really interesting to see the sort of "second stage" discovery of things like this when obsidian got hot, and I toyed with many of those for a while.
And the end result was me getting even further back into doing what zim does, and even finding new cool little time savers (e.g. interwiki links).
I'll die on the proverbial hill that the absolute worst instance of this has always been GIMP, which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.
It was and perhaps still is, a solid competitor to Photoshop, but any unfamiliar grownup is, quite reasonably, going to never ever ever trust anything to do serious work with a name like that.
I used GIMP before I ever used Photoshop. My experience was the opposite. I think that means the UIs are different, but there is no one that is objectively better, it's just a matter of what your expectations are, which are set by whatever you learned first.
As for CMYK support: why do designers even need to use this? Sure, not every RGB is the same, and it took some while before we even got sRGB as some standard, but the same goes for CMYK: every printer has its own profile. I had the displeasure of trying to get the CMYK profile of a "professional" printing company that only accepted files in CMYK, and they didn't even know which profile their printers used. Ideally you would send a RGB file including the display profile your screen uses, and then the printing facility converts that to whatever CMYK they need.
Of course there are also special colors or effects outside of RGB/CMYK that you might want to use when printing something, that's something else.
GIMP has god horrid UX, there's no way it could have eaten Adobes anything.
There's lineage of FOSS apps that stick by the "we're not X, we're different from X." mantra.
The discomfort, frustration and unintuitiveness you're feeling from using our app? It's just you!
No, that's not bad design and bad UX! its simply because we are different! We aren't X (Photoshop), we just do things differently here!".
We've implemented a number of items from the issue posts once consensus was reached, and we hope more people will participate and help improve GIMP further.
I agree GIMP is a bad name, but is it really a 'solid' competitor to Photoshop? My impression has been that it was never close to being competitive on features. I've only used either of them very briefly so I may be wildly wrong though.
IIRC, it was too expensive to make Gimp support non-RGB color spaces needed for professional image editing.
I use it semi-regularly and it does a great job for me, and most of UX is clear and obvious (high DPI support is lacking). But I haven't used Photoshop since the 90s (or Aldus PhotoStyler before it was acquired by Adobe ;)).
I think it could have been -- which is to say, I think a better name earlier on could have well been what could have gotten more contributors etc etc. Network effects and such.
Agreed. Also, that fu king mascot, Wilber?, that chihuahua looking thing didn't help normies without a sense of whimsy take it serious.
It really conveyed the image of cheap and shoddy. The drab looking logos, the name, and the weird looking poodle: all that just made it harder to take serious.
> which could have perhaps eaten Adobe's lunch MANY years ago.
That "perhaps" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. GIMP has never, even now, been a serious competitor to Adobe's products for professionals. To suggest that if they simply had a better name they would be the top dog is laughable.
Be careful. The language police have already got rid of "master". They were eyeing up gimp for a takeover or rename but I don't think it got very far. Perhaps all their energy was spent on removing the slavery from git.
It's about professionalism. It's a tradeoff. I see both sides of getting rid of e.g. "master;" but GIMP is so well beyond. Even if you make the argument that it's not offensive you're still stuck with a name that absolutely connotes "this thing is not going to be good at things."
I think that would be too reductive. The objective productive factors of software are what give it actual value. The author could have chosen to write "produce useful software", but did not.
That first sentence feels like one of those fake-deep things that sounds important, but can effectively be used to justify about anything?
Which is to say, in a world that's -- you know -- a society; not screwing over the other guy is often, if not usually, a good way to "optimize your own citizens economic prospects," too.
The very first sentence crashes and burns, because there are multiple moral systems and compasses. Using "imperative" in the context of morals is extra spicy, because it reference a very specific, very strict moral code - The Categorical Imperative.
The CI is, in my experience, not a moral system about personal or group advantage, but about rules the can govern everybody.
You're right this is how people are PRESENTLY using the term "hallucination," but to me this illustrates the deeper truth about that term and that concept:
As many have said but it still bears repeating -- they're always hallucinating. I'm of the opinion that its a huge mistake to use "hallucination" as meaning "the opposite of getting it right." It's just not that. They're doing the same thing either way.
Yeah, I know that sounds fake-deep but we've seen this before; I'm old enough to remember when WordPerfect was the standard that wasn't going anywhere.
It will just be one of those inflection-point thingies.
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