The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/new-word-processor-wars-fresh-crop-productivity-apps-trying-reinvent-workday/

by prostoalex • 8 years ago

131 104 8 years ago

Notion and Coda are attractive, but I'm wondering if the learning curve is too steep. Not sure if my team would use them without me setting everything up.

sachin4• 8 years ago

We've tried to focus Notejoy on being as intuitive as possible to support any kind of team. Because of this, we've seen a variety of teams beyond just startups adopt Notejoy, including coffee shops, law firms, freelancers, agencies, coaches, and more.

bkanber3• 8 years ago

I use Notion for personal projects and love it. Very easy to learn. I used it to plan and execute my NaNoWriMo challenge last month and really have nothing bad to say about it. Works well on all my devices.

But it's unstructured. I think in a work environment it's most useful as a wiki/project planner/lightweight tracker, but still can't replace the MS/Google office suite, and can't replace Jira/Asana for in depth ticketing.

elithrar• 8 years ago

I’d agree: Notion is great for individuals, a household, maybe even a small business? But it’d be a tough ask to scale to 100 people in an engineering org. But who knows, maybe it will find a niche like Basecamp did?

It is a wonderful replacement for Evernote though, and it makes you wonder what Evernote has been doing all these years? The formatting, drag/drop, multiple views on the same docs are great.

ghostly_s3• 8 years ago

Interesting, haven't heard of this one. From a quick perusal of the site it looks kind of like a more feature-ful Workflowy, is that a fair impression?

SllX2• 8 years ago

At this point I look at Word and Excel the same way I look at bash, gcc, grep, sed, awk, et cetera: there is so much iniertia that even when different and arguably better tools come along, it still never truly goes away.

A lot of people still use emacs, vim, BBEdit and so on, but a lot of people also use IntelliJ, VSCode and Atom or whatever is in vogue this year. Vim and emacs will never truly go away no matter how many CPU architectures or operating systems come along this century, and neither will Word. At some point software is just infrastructure. We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn’t an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down, and it isn’t like Word prevented Markdown and TeX and HTML from finding their niches.

omeid2• 8 years ago

Some other important factor about the software you have listed is that they are actively maintained, either because they have a community or a profitable enterprise behind them, I don't think inertia alone is enough.

jen729w4• 8 years ago

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die.

Excel, however, is magic. Forget the nasty ribbon interface and the horrid MS window chrome, I'm just talking about what happens inside those cells.

Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, about the fact that Excel is possibly over-used and that users should probably get a database. I don't care. Excel, at its core, is a magical product. Nothing else gets close to its functionality/friction curve (assuming you already know how to Excel, that is).

dvtrn• 8 years ago

Is this truly attributable to what Excel is actually capable of (excluding those cases like people who manage to accomplish things like 3D rendering with excel) or that Excel just has better market saturation and is, by default, the only spreadsheet tool people in the Enterprise are given to work with and we just normalized ourselves to what it does, but maybe not so many other spreadsheet file formats?

amphibian87• 8 years ago

Why don't you like Word?

I think it's still going to be the best for a while, if not only because it's massive. My CS professor says it's the biggest program ever written.

It can so so much, like check for passive voice and more subtle grammar things.

At the end of the day, the subscription model is off-putting, but "needs to die?" why?

arkh• 8 years ago

Not even inside the cells. Excel column / rows filters. Hard to do better than those. I wish a lot more apps with data implemented something half as good.

rusk5• 8 years ago

My two weapons of choice:

Excel for structured data, Emacs for unstructured data.

xte11• 8 years ago

Mh, I have sometimes to work with "tabular datas" that seems to fit well with spreadsheets... Before I discover org-mode and Emacs I normally use *sv sources/exports and CLI tools simply because I never being able to be productive or in comfort with ANY spreadsheet I tried. Now I'm in org with tables and babel I never look back.

IMO spreadsheets are a poor and ineffective answer to the miss of a serious desktop database tool with a nice DSL for end users.

piker• 8 years ago

Word, yes. Word is a turd. Word needs to die.

It's not clear you'd find a lot of lawyers (i.e., a class of power small-document-scale Word users) that would agree with this sentiment.

Quarrelsome• 8 years ago

Excel needs to die or find a better means of placing process on top of hideously embedded business logic that lives inside those sheets. Trying to reign in the entropy of VBA macros across an organisation is a _massive_ headache.

TeMPOraL6• 8 years ago

We can build better bridges than we could a century ago, but there isn’t an incentive to replace a bridge until it falls down

WRT. Emacs/vim vs. VSCode/Atom, I can only say that we may know how to build better bridges than in the past, but for some reason we opt not to. It's like the goal of new software is everything except empowering users. Optimizing for ease of onboarding, for looks, for extracting value from users via business model trickery, etc. But not for utility.

ecpottinger• 8 years ago

I thought Wang made the first word-processors.

matthiaswh• 8 years ago

I'm curious what open source options will crop up in this space. So far I haven't seen anything promising that compares to the Notion or the Air Table approach.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 8 years ago

One advantage of Microsoft Office is that I can reasonably expect that in 20 years Word will still be around and will be able to read the files I write today. With these apps, I would be surprised if in 5 years I could read the files created with these apps.

tonysdg• 8 years ago

It's worth noting this is a testament to Microsoft's (extreme) dedication to backwards compatibility.

I sometimes wonder who's more fanatical: the glibc folks or MS. But it seems to have paid off for both teams in the end, so (especially as a young engineer) who am I to judge?

jdblair2• 8 years ago

This is especially noteworthy because the older Word formats were essentially memory dumps of the data structures used to store the document.

sachin4• 8 years ago

While we have no plans to go anywhere at Notejoy, we do acknowledge that this fear is very real. So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point, so you can rest assured that you'll always be able to take them with you.

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

The irony is that Google will probably shutter Drive before you guys go anywhere :)

arglebargle75• 8 years ago

Don't take this the wrong way, but... you've flipped multiple startups. Why would I believe that "you have no plans to go anywhere" this time?

TeMPOraL6• 8 years ago

So to address it we support full bulk export of all your notes to Google Drive at any point

Could you instead provide an option to bulk export all my notes to my own drive, via a .zip file?

npunt2• 8 years ago

Agree, data lock-in is probably the biggest concern I have with any new productivity or note-taking tool.

It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization. I don't know about other tools but at least with Airtable I know I can always hit the API to get my data, though I will miss out on certain business logic around it like data validation, and probably a lot of other details.

The best proxy I have to allay some of my data portability concerns is how much funding the companies have. Funding is a double-edged sword but comparing two companies, one funded at $50m and the other at $5m, it's hard not to go with the former. I am heartened though to see that some of my favorite tools (Airtable and Coda) have gotten very large investments, which tell me they'll be around for a while. When I see similar products not getting those investments, it's a strong signal to stay away or only use them as a toy.

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

New tools need to signal their trustworthiness by exporting to legacy formats. Even if it means losing something in the process. Give me CSV, DOCX, or an SQLite DB. Not exactly rocket science.

TeMPOraL6• 8 years ago

It's tough because innovations in tools generally require some degree of schema or file format customization.

It's not tough. All it needs is to allow me to download the data in whatever format you actually use to store it, or some serialization of it. Myself, or other interested parties, can reverse-engineer it if they're too lazy (or too much into abusive business models) to provide documentation of the format. It's simple as that. The lock-in isn't in the format, it's in the inability to get the full document (and possibly reimport it later) in any format at all.

TeMPOraL6• 8 years ago

What files?

When talking about SaaS (or more accurately, SaaSS[0]), you can "share" stuff between devices and people, but you don't control the data. You don't get a self-contained file that you can store and use independent of the service.

Just that is enough for me to prefer Word or OpenOffice whenever I can (and really, I just use Org Mode whenever I can get away with it).

[0] - Service as a Software Substitute. See also: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s....

doctorRetro• 8 years ago

Yep. A few years back I tried out a handful of new apps, or at least new at the time. Two have folded, the third merged with another service and offers very basic backward compatibility. While I'm not a huge fan of Office, and I think Google Docs/Drive is in need of a big update, they're both likely to be here in five years.

c-smile• 8 years ago

Try my HTML-NOTEPAD then (https://html-notepad.com).

Documents there are just HTML files that will be readable for centuries to come.

O1111OOO• 8 years ago

What a great solution! I've been on the lookout for a basic (non-bloated) local, html-based word-processor to replace RTF (for myself and as a recommendation for others). HTML-notepad is loading very quickly on an older dual-core 1.2ghz laptop I'm using right now (xfce, debian 64bit). The resulting html is remarkably tidy.

Love the fact that it's portable! Plus... no data-mining:)

I have a large set of local html pages that I use for bookmarks, PIM stuff, etc. It's my goto personal organizer. Mostly html 3.x, lots of tables. HTML-notepad has handled these pages without issues. To my surprise, it even displayed a search form embedded on one of these pages elegantly. Really like the way you implemented the editing of links to minimize the steps: click on link, pop-up to edit.

Also integrates into Firefox as a "view source" editor - nice (since it handles my local html pages so well)!

The only basic tag that's missing is the HR tag (horizontal rule). It displays fine but doesn't appear on any of the menus. Tables are very well behaved but... minor point: I expected that pressing TAB within a TD would jump me to the next TD.

It doesn't seem to care about html tags it doesn't understand - basically leaving them alone. This is pretty awesome, since I use the following a lot:

     <details>
      <summary>
      Title (data)
      </summary>
      Expanded, multi-line (data)
     </details>

I've been "playing" around with html-notepad for about an hour and so far, no issues whatsoever. It's not often that a new program appears that could potentially become an integral part of my daily workflow. Thank you for sharing this!

npunt2• 8 years ago

Just a quibble but I see this a lot - if you're talking about strategy it's "bottom-up", not "bottoms-up".

A bottom-up strategy is something like marketing your tool to users who then bring it into their company for wider adoption.

A bottoms-up strategy is drinking until the problem goes away.

sachin4• 8 years ago

Hah! I've def made this mistake

why_only_15• 8 years ago

you shouldn't discount the power of the second one

brylie• 8 years ago

As a recovering alcoholic, I can attest that drinking does not resolve life's problems.

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

I have the same feeling about this, and I've noticed that folks from the UK are more likely to use "bottoms-up" to mean both. I rarely hear it from US-born speakers. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

dijit• 8 years ago

I'm British,

Never heard "bottoms-up" to mean the same as "bottom up"

Bottoms up is when you finish your drink.

Bottom up is sitting on a high surface (put your bottom up, usually said to a child), or lifting something from the inverse of where it's normally handled from or, like the parent said: a set of business strategies.

opan• 8 years ago

Not a Brit myself, but I've noticed they tend to put an s on the end of a lot of things. e.g. "maths"

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

Surprised to get downvoted for asking a question to see if others have found the same thing. I'm not passing judgment — I have a background in linguistics and see grammar/usage as descriptive, not prescriptive. I just wondered if usage was different in the UK. Sorry if this was misconstrued as passing judgment, or something else that apparently warrants downvotes.

jacobkg• 8 years ago

Not mentioned in the article but WorkFlowy (YC ‘10) is still going strong. Minimalist web-based word processor with a flexible outline format. Can hold hundreds of thousands of items, without you getting overwhelmed.

sachin4• 8 years ago

The same author actually wrote about WorkFlowy a few months back: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/workflowly-founder-new-list-up...

ghostly_s3• 8 years ago

I'm a Workflowy user but would never describe it as a general-purpose word processor, even with the "minimal" modifier. There are no formatting tools whatsoever. It's more of a minimalist mind-mapping tool.

lewisjoe• 8 years ago

Good insights on the trends in word processor markets. But, including rich text editors and note-taking apps into the word processor market is bit of an overstretch.

Note-making apps are typically for digital screens, with a limited set of tools for document creation.

Word processors cater both for digital screens and print media. They'd have a richer tool-set and are for power document making people.

Interestingly both categories have made lots of improvements recently, when it comes to sharing, reviewing and co-editing.

Take, Zoho Writer (https://www.zoho.com/writer/) for example. The product beautifully carries the ease-of-use of simpler apps, without compromising on the richer word processor features. This takes the game one-level up. Simple writing apps now have to bring in more document creation features to compete in the market with word processors. Otherwise, they are just their own category with their own market.

daniel_iversen• 8 years ago

I’m disappointed to not see our Dropbox Paper in that writeup, although it’s a good article! Wish they wouldn’t call it “word processor wars” though since that of course misses the point - it has too many associations to the printed page whereas I think everyone incl the author and the people quoted knows it’s about a more collaborative content creation experience.

watersb• 8 years ago

Yes. Dropbox Paper is fantastic.

netcan• 8 years ago

There was a Firefox thread on here yesterday. Interesting one.

My take was that 10-15 years ago, FF's feature gap was enourmous. Tabs. Extensions like firebug for web development, adblocking for browsing, various "social add-ons" that were innovative and exciting. IE 6 was a dinosaur.

The question for these is.. what more do you/we want from a word processor?

chapium• 8 years ago

Integration with documemt and version control with anything other than sharepoint. Something that is guaranteed to work without application crashes. Configurable Cloud storage/saving. 100% open document formatting to allow for interoperability.

xte11• 8 years ago

Well... Few time ago I discover my "definitive" productivity app: Emacs. In few months it became the center of my IT life. And I still have to see ANY more effective, simple, flexible, pleasure to use modern application that can only compete with at least some aspects of Emacs.

The problem IMO is that in the glory time of IT software was not a business, was a free thing that came with hw and if it was good and flexible people are more willing to buy your iron. Now (not from now) that software became a product commercial need destroy freedom and evolution creating a modern, colorful, limited and limiting digital middle-age that can barely stand like Babel's tower...

IMO sooner or later tower will collapse and the more we wait the more it will hurt.

More about software: our society mostly live on text: laws are text, newspapers are text, books are mostly text, text is the cheapest and effective means of communication we have so if we really want to being productive we need to have something focused on text. Yes, we have also images, videos, audios, but they are still marginal. We have excellent audiobooks, super-nice videos and diagrams/images that communicate something an order of magnitude better than text but they are still hard to make, hard to design, rare, not really flexible etc. so while we have to work on them hard and constantly to better support/integrate our focus must still be on text. For many years to come.

Try only to do most common task without a keyboard and see how unproductive, limited and hard they are even with the best touch UI we have, with all "AI" support possible.

That's a lesson nearly nobody want to learn but that's also the reality we have to face, willing or not.

mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

While I like to see competition, I still think Microsoft has the market for the foreseeable future because you get so much value. My yearly subscription for Office 365 family plan is just renewing and I can;t imagine not paying $99/year for: everyone in the family gets 1 TB of cloud storage, web based apps (which work just fine on Linux), and always up to date versions of the Office apps, if you want those too, and quality mobile apps for access to documents anytime.

I use markdown and Latex to write my books, but I still find a lot of value in Office for occasional uses.

Djvacto• 8 years ago

I'd love to have one notebook-type app that works between all my devices, or some combination that lets me have the same or similar content.

I loved OneNote back in Uni, though I reached a point where I stopped taking notes (through the fault of the powerpoint teaching method, and my own laziness), and OneNote does seem to be a bit bloat-y when it comes to sync.

Stuff like EMACS org-mode (or, preferrably, some kind of Visual Studio Code equivalent) seems enticing, but I'm not sure how I could hook that into my phone in a way that isn't a terminal emulator.

Anyone found anything (app, service, or custom setup) that works for them?

newen• 8 years ago

I use orgzly to take notes in my phone. It can create and edit org files and sync the files through Dropbox. Then you can edit the files in your computer through a Dropbox sync folder. It's just a nice app for taking notes for me though. I haven't even edited the notes through my computer. Good to know that my notes are backed up without having to use some opaque backup method.

bkanber3• 8 years ago

Try out Notion. Works great on all my devices (MacBook, Chromebook, Android). Free tier is quite generous.

I really like that in Notion you can just spin up quick data tables with rich data objects underneath.

But also -- don't underestimate just having a notebook. For daily todolist type stuff I just use a pocket sized moleskin and the "Bullet journaling" method.

com2kid2• 8 years ago

OneNote's sync has been completely rewritten, if you haven't tried it out in awhile, give it a go. It is much faster now, literal orders of magnitude.

mickael-kerjean• 8 years ago

Yes, there's a bunch of org mode client that works everywhere, I built this one: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/wiki/Release-0....

honkycat• 8 years ago

My problem with these sorts of tools is always the same: I have been spoiled by my emacs keybindings ( evil mode ), the ability to parse structured text, org-mode, and command line tooling.

I do not have to open a web browser and navigate, I just launch my helm-project-search buffer and type `org/work`. I then have a fuzzy search that matches on file name. Toss these files into a dropbox folder, and you are good to go.

None of these applications I have seen support structured text such that I can export / import through Emacs. They cling to your data as tightly as possible and do NOT want to let it go.

I was working as a hobby on an RPG supplement for a popular anime series. I was attracted to notion and coda, but was dismayed to find I did not have a way to turn the data I entered into structured data which I can query to generate an attractive webpage for the game.

The new word processor wars: A fresh crop of productivity apps

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