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A comment on Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times?.

Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by ghaff on Monday May 10, 2021 @10:46AM (#27106514)
Essentially every attempt to provide a viable mainstream alternative to Word for Windows failed (to a first approximation) until online office suites became viable. [ADDED: I understand this wasn't intended to be directly a Word competitor but it was part of a general industry interest in Microsoft competition.]

You can critique individual efforts but there wasn't really a big appetite for Word competitors and there was a lot of inertia among mainstream office workers.

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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by sodapopcan on Monday May 10, 2021 @10:58AM (#27106644)
Not sure if this is what you're implying but OpenDoc wasn't a competitor to Office, it was a development framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc

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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by ghaff on Monday May 10, 2021 @11:11AM (#27106783)
I understand that. I worded it poorly. But it was still part of a general space that was interested in Microsoft alternatives.
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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by sodapopcan on Monday May 10, 2021 @12:57PM (#27108130)
Ah cool cool. My bad!
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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by bombcar on Monday May 10, 2021 @10:56AM (#27106614)
I feel that online office suites only became viable because they had multiplayer Word and Excel before Microsoft did (and Google Docs was free).

The "online" aspect was so good that people overlooked the shortcomings compared to Office.

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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by ghaff on Monday May 10, 2021 @11:02AM (#27106682)
>overlooked the shortcomings compared to Office.

I agree with your general point but I'd also argue that, for a lot of people (including myself), the reduced feature set was mostly a feature, not a bug. I use presentation and word processor apps a lot, but I'm not really a "power user" these days.

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Re:Why did OpenDoc fail, and then fail 3 more times? by Macha on Monday May 10, 2021 @01:52PM (#27108789)
I can't say I've ever missed any Word features in Google Docs, and would pretty much agree there. There have been a few cases I wished Google Sheets did more and found Excel did support what I was looking for, though back when I used Excel (mostly in college) I used it less heavily then I use Google Sheets today.
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