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."

Comments

Never heard of 'em

[bluegutang]

I've never heard of any of these apps. Do they do anything that currently existing apps don't? Or is this a slashvertisement?

Re:Never heard of 'em

[ceoyoyo]

Yes! They integrate messaging so you have to use whatever messaging system + interface they think you should! And they're in the cloud so they can spy on you! But you can do everything in one window, just like the good old days of single-tasking workstations! Retro style!

Re:Never heard of 'em

[cayenne8]

Yes! They integrate messaging so you have to use whatever messaging system + interface they think you should!

Ugh...."messaging"...I want LESS messaging so I can actually get work done, without an endless breaking of my concentration.

Collaborate belongs mostly in short meetings, only when it actually serves a purpose.

I shut off IM most of the time, so I can actually get work done without constant interruptions.

Re:Never heard of 'em

[cayenne8]

Not to mention that I don't want Yet Another Messaging Program that can't talk to all the other messaging programs that I "have" to run to connect with people.

You know, I've come to find out that pretty much everyone has email.

I converse almost exclusively that way.

It has a better CYA paper trail, is more searchable going back years, etc....than for any IM I've had to try to use.

It is more asynchronous too to me, than IM, so, it doesn't interrupt me and I can look while on break.

And email works with email...so, not having to worry about which IM app works with which.

Re:Never heard of 'em

[ceoyoyo]

You don't understand. A modern economy is composed of a few percent of people who actually do the work, and the rest who "organize," "supervise," "plan," "administer," or similar. You may be part of the former, but if the majority concentrates too hard they might figure out that their purpose is to add to the N in the phrase "I have N people under me."

Re:Never heard of 'em

[vtcodger]

Forget 1992. The first version of Lotus 123 was released in 1983.

It'd be interested to see a comparison of time for moderately skilled operators to do a set of routine tasks on the current version of Office vs these new productivity apps vs Lotus 123+Word Perfect+Eudora+Power Point running on MSDOS6 vs emacs. Wouldn't surprise me at all that the "modern productivity apps" came in a distant fourth.

That's kind of a funny statement...

[SuperKendall]

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. :-)

Re:That's kind of a funny statement...

[darkain]

I know! I'll write a productivity app to evaluate productivity apps to determine their level of productivity. https://xkcd.com/927/

If only Office had improved any since 97 ...

[damn_registrars]

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.

Re:If only Office had improved any since 97 ...

[Solandri]

This problem extends to Windows as well. When Microsoft tried to get everyone to switch to Metro apps, they moved a lot of Windows configuration settings to the Metro-like Settings dialog. These were settings which had been in the same place since Windows 2000, so every IT person knew where it was. When they changed it, not only did every IT person have to learn the new location, but every online instruction guide was immediately made obsolete. Then people rebelled against Metro so Microsoft moved some of the settings back. Except their hearts weren't really into it, so now Windows is left with its configuration settings in two different places - in the Metro-like Settings (Windows key=>gear icon), and Control Panel.

The solution to this is simple. Let the user select the layout. If you want to add a snazzy new Ribbon interface, knock yourself out. But there should be a simple menu option which lets you easily and immediately select "Layout - Office 97 classic, Office 2003 (bubbly), Office 2007 (with ribbons), Office 2013 (with rearranged buttons), Office 2016 (I don't know what's new because I haven't yet found the buttons I lost track of in 2013), custom." Then each user can easily and immediately select the UI layout that works best for them. But it seems like UI designers' egos can't stand the idea of people not using the snazzy new interface they designed. So they force everyone to use the new interface with no way to revert to the old one.

And it's not just Microsoft. Google has been vacillating between allowing or blocking Dark Mode in its Android apps (it's currently blocked). This isn't even a user preference thing. OLED displays use more power when displaying white, which seems to be the predominant theme with Google's apps. So switching to Dark Mode can add several hours of battery life. It's a functional change which objectively impacts the usability of many devices. But some Google designer with a stick up his/her ass can't stand the thought of people using the apps in a way that looks different from the way they designed it to look so keeps getting Dark Mode blocked.

Clue to designers: Your design is not successful when you force people to use it. Your design is successful when you give people a choice and they willingly choose your design.

Re:If only you'd spend your time productively...

[phantomfive]

Why are you sticking to their software? There are so many others around.

There's no real replacement for Excel.

Wait - say what?

[93 Escort Wagon]

"... 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?

Re:WordPerfect Function Keys

[NormalVisual]

It sounds like you want to have stable function key access for all the features, which was one of the awesome features of WordPerfect.

And one of the others was "Reveal Codes". It made child's play of figuring out what unprintable dreck was screwing up your document.

Re:If only you'd spend your time productively...

[apoc.famine]

Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.

Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.

Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.

Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.

Re:If only you'd spend your time productively...

[citylivin]

"Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet."

Ok its very valid and I have personally had that happen multiple times, but your solution of "program in python or R" is laughable. Do you honestly think most offices have programmers on staff? Are you asking office workers to learn a programming language, what, in their spare time?

People use excel and VB macros because its easy to learn, its available in literally every office in the land, and there are many online resources available. And if you can write python code that needs no maintenance for 15 years i applaud you. I am not sure a "real" programming language would help the regular office worker at all. All code needs to be maintained, or its the exact same trap. And you think they will put their code in version control? Repeat after me, office workers are NOT programmers! They would have the exact same sloppy habits and zero documentation no matter what language they are using.