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The New Word Processor Wars: A Fresh Crop of Productivity Apps Are Trying To Reinvent Our Workday (geekwire.com)
Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's iWork, you're still following the Microsoft model. But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. GeekWire:
There's a new war on over the way we work, and the old "office suite" is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords in tech have been "AI" and "mobile." Today, you can add "collaboration" to that list -- these days, everybody wants to build Slack-like communication into their apps.
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. "Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
I've never heard of any of these apps. Do they do anything that currently existing apps don't? Or is this a slashvertisement?
Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive
That would be great, except that it takes an infinite amount of time to evaluate an unlimited number of productivity apps. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I might be too curmudgeony here, but every time I find myself having to install a newer version of MS Office I find myself missing the previous one(s) more. In my case it's not even the word processor as much as it is in the spreadsheet though. Has anyone else been bothered by how many times the "Fill" command in Excel has moved in the past 20 years? When I started really using it a lot it was under Edit (Alt-E, F, R for right). Then it was moved to Insert (Alt-I, F, R). Then it was moved somewhere else. Then it got hidden behind ribbons. Now where the hell is it?
For Fill -> Down it was easy - Ctrl-R. But no standard shortcut has ever existed for Fill -> Right. And playing hide-and-seek with it doesn't make it better either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... while I churn out text in nvi, send it by email using mutt, put it on the 'web using awk and make, and write very nicely laid-out letters --including invoices, that's the stuff that gets you money-- using troff and a custom macroset that includes my letterhead.
Because without "apps" or that excreable bit of awful "word processing software" that can barely put comic sans on paper, I'm not productive. Right.
I don't need a word processor, I need a text editor.
I'd love to see a next-gen spreadsheet program that could marry Excel with something like SPSS or Minitab and with Tableau or Cognos. I want a 1-stop program that can handle day to day sheets, but enough power under the hood to do statistical & forecast modeling along with creating executive dashboards/reports.
In the old days, people chose tools according to what they needed to do.
Now, the tool is designed by someone who studied user interfaces, instead of how users interface with the tools, so they feel no compulsion to make it work the way users normally work.
"rapid-fire discussion threads" tend to be unfocused explosions of verbosity, so that is a bad user interface to model.
I made a chat! I'm a big boy now!!
Why are you sticking to their software? There are so many others around. Including free ones that don't come with a marketeering department attached, so no redesigning the interface to help with sales. Try a couple, pick one you like. See it as an investment in general well-being since you no longer have to annoy yourself fighting their crap software.
Me, the very few times a spreadsheet turns out to be the best (quickly available) tool for the job, I use teapot. But for most by far purposes other people stoop to spreadsheets for, there are better solutions. Well, at least on my platform there are. If it isn't on yours, maybe you should stop letting yourself be bamboozled by the shiny and get something that at least gets out of the way while you're busy getting work done, if actively supporting you is out of the question.
thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud
The flip-side to this is "easy come, easy go". When one starts storing their stuff in somebody else's space, it might go away if the provider closes shop. Even if you are able to download your data, you still need to find another app that can read it.
For all the grumbling about MS Office, they do a great job with backwards compatibility and offer "read-only" versions of their apps for free.
Mod parent up
Thanks for modding me down, meme buzzword junkie.
"Work has totally changed," said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box
Correction: "We're selling a solution to a problem that was solved decades ago, and we want you to buy it."
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M$ Office needs to natively support ODF!
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It sounds like you want to have stable function key access for all the features, which was one of the awesome features of WordPerfect. I remember the templates that everyone taped above their function keys. I even had a keyboard with a built-in template holder that included templates for WordPerfect and several other popular programs of the day.
The problem now is that everything is mouse based. The majority of users never learn keyboard shortcuts, so the shortcuts aren't so short.
If you aren't an ADHS yet, you'll become one! Guaranteed! By the way: we'll kill your company, as a collateral.
Maybe these collaborative things work well for some people, but I can tell you that for software development - even Agile - the lure of tools like these are dangerous. Because faster isn't always better. You can't sacrifice sound engineering principles and system design for speed.
Full disclosure: I have been working on a project for a year now that has been going on for 2.5 years... that was supposed to release in 6 months originally. The original team that built it has been fired, and we are left holding the bag. They were all about fast fast fast. And they wrote a ton of code without thought to design or maintainability. They threw together "documentation" on collaboration tools. Their bug/story process statuses were new/open/closed. They copied/pasted code throughout the system because it was faster than building a common, reusable module. They didn't have testers, and development didn't write tests because NO TIME FOR THAT. We are on AWS and the code wasn't written to leverage elastic computing because even though that was promised, it would be faster to get it working and refactor it later. (hint: they never got it working, so we will have to eat that one and refactor it).
So this project has been a perfect example of how NOT to do a project, and fast collaboration was just one piece of the disaster. So I'll take the old-fashioned ways of building a sustainable project and documentation, thank you very much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I just don't care anymore. I've got appFatigue
"... although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello"
It appears that, by "very different take on the spreadsheet", the author means "not useable as a spreadsheet by any stretch of the imagination".
Has the author never actually used a spreadsheet?
#DeleteChrome
The list on wikipedia for historical spreadsheet software is woefully incomplete. I have a Business Software magazine from the 80s, and they reviewed nearly a dozen just for the PC, IIRC. In addition, there were multiple spreadsheet programs for all the various computers offered back then. The same situation existed for other office products.
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I pretty much run Office 2003 inside a locked down VM for all my word processing needs. It's clean, it's lean, and I can easily full screen the VM window to block out all the distractions flooding in from the host OS. I've got snapshots of the entire thing in various states, if anything ever happens I can simply roll it back to a known state.
At home, one of my hobbies includes writing. I use an ancient IBM 760xd for that, which boots into DOS and runs a copy of Word Perfect. I don't want or need anything more. When I'm writing, I'm writing, and I can be damned well sure that system (which is a proper reliable tool) is never going to change and mess up my workflow.
Modern day "cloud" enabled bullshit can fuck right off for all I care. I don't want someone trying to reinvent my workday. I already know what I have to do and I just want some tools that will stay the hell out of my way and let me get stuff done.
I am honestly at the point in my life (and I'm only 37) where I'm actually looking back at software, not forwards. I'm looking back at all the wonderful things people have written and forgotten and going "what's wrong with that?". A lot of it is perfectly stable and totally usable, given that it came from a day and age where people tended to release products that were actually complete. I can virtualize nearly anything I want these days, and it's barely a minor inconvenience considering the benefit of being able to run no-bullshit software that actually expects me to know what I'm doing, or be logical enough to figure out the stuff I don't.
Modern day software has gone completely off the rails. My job hasn't changed in the past decade and I doubt it ever will. Nobody cares what I use as long as the job gets done, and for that I'm actually looking at running some of this stuff for as long as physically possible- that is to say, for the rest of my life if I can. I simply do not have the time or mental willpower to deal with anything "new and fancy" anymore. Not when I can reach into the past and dust off a perfectly good product that actually works and does what it was designed to do exceptionally well.
There's no real replacement for Excel
That's exactly right. There's only a replacement for 99% of it.
The fact this doesn't get a mention is baffling.
I think it's more word perfect model.. than office model
Incompatible file formats, and inability to read your old existing files and run their macros.
There is still absolutely nothing that comes close to MS Word when it comes to a WYSIWYG Word processor and as a Review tool for multi-version, multi-author (asynchronous editing, not collaborative, synchronous multi-author editing). And even though Word has been "dealing with it" with cloud features, Sharepoint/365 and whatnot, there is nothing that comes close to Google Docs for collaborative work. ...except maybe git combined with LaTeX. Although for purely synchronous authoring, especially working on very, VERY close sections, not having to "save a file" (or commit it, so it gets pushed to others) and having versioning built-in, Google Docs still beats the rest. And WYSIWYG also still goes for Word at the end of the day.
> "Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive."
Sp after having 30 years of (de facto) standardization, we're moving back to 5 billions ways to do anything, all of which are mutually incompatible with each other and all trying to get customer lock-in so that it's harder for people to switch away, and thus forcing everyone to either purchase multiple subscriptions for multiple tools or be stuck.
How many of these supposed new generation tools support standard file formats like Open Office's OOXML (As opposed to Microsoft anything-but OpenXML)? Probably less than one hand worth, if even that.
I'd like to help but I can't. I tried adding "write a ToDo app" to my ToDo list but I can't because I don't have an app for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm sorry, but the traditional word processor design hasn't "gotten dusty" at all. It's been a pretty established framework for decades because writers need an application that works that way!
This push to make everything "collaborative" with chat clients and ability for a whole group to add sidebar notes to everything creates a big distraction. A good document needs to be focused on by the person writing it. It can be reviewed after that, and marked up as needed with suggested corrections. But the editor doing the proofreading should ALSO be doing that by him/herself, while he/she can give it the undivided attention it deserves.
I remember when a lot of people considered it a "feature" when a word processor would take over the whole screen with almost nothing but the text being typed. Writers appreciated that lack of distraction or temptation to click around on menus to try out various features, rather than concentrating on the work at hand.
I find that even doing regular computer support or troubleshooting, the multiple IM client options just raise my stress levels and make things take twice as long to get completed. People keep barging in, asking for updates on where you're at with something, or for some information on why X or Y is down. I can't see how it would benefit anyone trying to write some technical documentation or anything else, having a whole group constantly interacting and suggesting things while you're trying to concentrate?
At my company, we have to do frequent audit responses, department reports and responses to vendors and without Google docs and sheets we would have been extremely constrained by workload.
The co-authoring/multiuser editing is amazing and combined with the additional collaboration features in the rest of the suite (of tools) it means we will not be going back to MS-office.
Text files. I trying to use simple text files the more I can (my personal files are 95% text files). Then I export it to PDF, ODF, ... if required.
...), PDF, PNG, ...
I try to use only future proof (25+ years) file formats : text (org-mode, Markdown, LaTeX,
This quote resume the way I treat MY data (don't remember where I read it) : I'm using apps against data, not housing my data in an app.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
So? Microsoft did it all, huh? Screw AppleWorks. Screw VisiCalc. Microsoft invented the work world as we know it. ... ... NOT! -- Microsoft also invented the dizzying world of ribbons and re-arranging the user interface so that no one could find a menu item they needed. And now most of these apps are doing the same thing, just with yet another different look and feel. Don't worry, in a year or so they'll be adding rounded corners and 3D highlights to tabs and buttons too. And they'll have an AI to channel their collaborative workspace..., and most people will turn that crap off so they can get some actual work done. Sheesh. Whatever.
In my experience some of this kind of tools may actually improve the productivity. However, the tools themselves tend to be relatively short-lived and/or have terrible data migration. Sometimes it may be that the data structure is too specific to the way the specific tool works. Much of the data stored within tend to get lost when switching to new tools
I believe that using them for day to day workflow *can* be useful as facilitators as long as any long-term useful information is stored elsewhere in common file formats on file systems or in revision control systems.
And of course, on another note, if you rely on SaaS for mission-critical stuff, you probably want a stable company and ToS behind it, not the next month's startup with a hip name and no 24/7 monitoring and support. I would guess that this disqualifies many of the artifacts mentioned in the OP (never heard of any of them).
If by, "being productive" you mean spending more and more time trying to master all the different so-called "distraction^Wproductivity tools" that different teams--both internal to the organization and the external ones--have decided to use.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
They didn't. They copied lotus 123 and word-perfect. As they did later with Netscape. They always surfed existing waves....
At my company, we have to do frequent audit responses, department reports and responses to vendors and without Google docs and sheets we would have been extremely constrained by workload.
The co-authoring/multiuser editing is amazing and combined with the additional collaboration features in the rest of the suite (of tools) it means we will not be going back to MS-office.
Office 365 has all those features and then some.
I have been using Libreoffice and formally OpenOffice for decades. It's great software, and the file saves are compressed so they don't take up as much space as .doc and .xls.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
It's the same thing as the shared whiteboard discussion we've had several years ago.
TEAM, lets get going on the proposal, everyone grab a post it note and sharpie pen and write your best five words
We'll have that 20 page business proposal done in 1/2 the time as using a dinosaur like MS word.
"Now they have almost unlimited ways of being UNproductive."
None of them comes close to what me and my friends at work can do with orgmode on emacs.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
Yes, with our new app, five people can take twice as long to do the work of one. That's what I call dealing with the over-productivity problem that many work environments face today.
Today's generation doesn't know WordPerfect, the word processor that started all of this.
As a software developer, I've long argued that the multitude of disjoined apps are a problem. I suggested that operating systems or desktop systems (like KDE and Gnome) provide a framework for services -- not applications -- so users can put together their own working environments, in whatever manners is most efficient for them.
When you open up a desktop like KDE or Gnome, not only do they work differently but the tools all have cryptic names that tell you little to nothing of what they are useful for. Each tool or app is an education in itself. The same goes for various Windows applications or phone apps.
What we REALLY want is not XYZ text editor (and 50 different editors in various programs) and PQR video editor, ZQY messenger, etc. We want services like:
- a text editor (to plugin everywhere we need to edit text so we don't have to learn different ones in every app)
- a spell checker (to work everywhere we want to check spelling)
- a grammar checker
- a sound recorder
etc..
And we want to use them in any activity in which they might come up -- not each application having its own implementation of each.
Implement them as transportable micro-services and let us put together our own workspaces with the tools accessible where we'd like them to be.
Similarly, if we want a video streamer... etc..