[fastball]

Sorry, with the first point I wasn't very clear, but what I meant was editing a document from a SSH'd shell, using a CLI text editor like vim, emacs, nano, or any of the plethora of existing tools that work out of the box to edit documents. Editing which can then be checked into version control like git. That is obviously very different from "you can build a CLI for LibreOffice which is currently compatible with the Track Changes implemented by MS Office but might not always be".

Having to use MS Word in the cloud doesn't really scratch the itch I'm talking about either.

That's cool about Office 2019, I did indeed not know about that. Can I perform these Sharepoint-enabled changes while offline? It seems like all of the things you are talking about require a centralized online server in order to do. Regardless, I do not think there is a conflict between the statements "you need Sharepoint to do these things" and "Track Changes cannot do these things".

[madhadron]

> a CLI text editor like vim, emacs, nano, or any of the plethora of existing tools that work out of the box to edit documents.

Asking a world that is used to what came out of Xerox PARC to switch back to 1970's technology on teletype emulators is...the only word I can think of is Quixotic.

[fastball]

The point is not that I want people to switch, it's that software developers have choice and lawyers / etc don't.

To write software, I can use a CLI text editor, a basic GUI text editor, an advanced text editor like Sublime or Atom or VS Code, or a full on IDE like the JetBrains products. I have so much choice, and all of these are interoperable with each other and have different places where they shine. All work with git. I just don't think the same thing can be said for the document-creation workflows around law and such.

[TeMPOraL]

A hammer is pretty much an ancient technology. A battery-powered plastic toy hammer, with buttons that play melodies, is a modern take. Yet serious people use the (modern implementations of) ancient-style hammer to drive nails.

That's my general response to "why use 1970s tech?", though I guess I'm being a bit unfair here. Word is, in some ways, a marvelous piece of engineering. The whole Office suite is. Unfortunately, thanks to path dependence and business strategies, it's also locked in a place where it's not interoperable with anything outside the Office ecosystem by default.

I guess I have an answer to the age-old question: in sci-fi shows, how come nobody in-universe notices their computing technology is, in many areas, ridiculously inefficient and ineffective compared to the old XX/early-XXI-century tech? The answer may be, the sci-fi future tech is built on so many layers of lowest-common-denominator, walled garden, non-interoperable tech that people no longer know how interoperability or efficient computing looks like.

[oceanplexian]

I don't disagree a hammer is still a useful too, a lot like how a pencil and paper can still be a useful tool for architecting software, or when we need to sketch something out. However when it comes time to build a new construction, no, people are not out there hammering every individual nail. They're using nail guns and all manner of power tools to complete the job because it's more consistent and less time consuming.

[kortilla]

Lol, claiming that using text files is somehow a regression is a pretty lame misdirection. You know what else came out of xerox parc? The GUI, the mouse, etc. You know what else is 1970s tech? The internet, databases, etc.

“Being old” is probably the lamest way to claim something shouldn’t be used.