[jakobegger]

Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it.

Photoshop, IntelliJ, MS Office — these apps can charge whatever they want, people just really need them to get their work done.

But if your app is a simple news reader or a markdown editor or an activity viewer — you‘re gonna have a hard time convincing people to pay for it every month.

[nv-vn]

Honestly, with Google Drive around I can't see how MS Office will remain profitable for long. Sure, it can handle some corner cases Google's product can't handle and it's the standard, but I can't see that staying the case for long. As for IntelliJ, I really have yet to understand the appeal. What does it do that other IDEs can't? Intellisense type stuff already exists everywhere (Visual Studio, so why use ReSharper?; Emacs; Vim; Sublime Text; Atom; VS Code; ...). Is it really just about being first-to-market? If so, why is it essential?

[mnx]

Seriously? Google docs has far, far less functionality. Have you tried, for example, to insert auto-numbered equations or images? There doesn't seem to be a way to achieve that. That's not a corner case. The spreadsheet also chokes on data that excel can handle. Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use, but I wouldn't call 20% "corner cases", and to cover them will take way more than 20% the effort of building MS Word.

[nv-vn]

Google Docs is still making Office non-essential for the average user. 90% of students have been purchasing Office for years in order to essentially perform the basic formatting provided by any rich-text editor purely for the purpose of compatibility.

>Google docs is fine for maybe 80% of use Which is able to undercut a good portion of Microsoft's market.

Keep in mind the original comment I was replying to:

>Subscription pricing requires the app to be so crucial you can‘t live without it.

MS Office is on its way to becoming redundant to the majority of users. The price is going to be less and less justified in the near future as Office loses its reputation as a crucial piece of software (at least for the average student/employee who doesn't need to perform very specific formatting or perform complex spreadsheet calculations).

[jakobegger]

You are forgetting the network effect.

Even if the average person doesn't need MS Office for their own work, there will always be this one prof that emails homework assignments in MS Word format, or the accountant that sends you an Excel Workbook to fill, etc.

Yes, if you're a programmer you can probably get away without Office. But for many people who collaborate with others, having a copy of Word / Excel / Powrpoint is still pretty much essential.

(Side note: I hate people who use Google Docs for their presentations. "Oops, I guess I shouldn't have pressed the back button". "Sorry for the delay, the presentation should load any minute now". "Could everyone please turn off Wifi on their phones so the speaker can open his presentation!")

[mnx]

You can (and should) export the presentation to pdf or ppt before presenting.

[mnx]

> at least for the average student/employee who doesn't need to perform very specific formatting or perform complex spreadsheet calculations)

I think my point was I think that even a typical student will find google docs lacking, but perhaps it is usable enough.

[TheRealDunkirk]

I'm still doing mail merges with Word and Excel. Can Docs/Sheets or Pages/Numbers do this? It's the only reason I have Office installed, and I'd love to delete it!