Thanks, @AndreaJames, for this essay-like text. I dig it.
Just FTR, I don’t follow here:
Office 365 has document lock-in, but the exact same forces that weakened Windows in the first place weaken the idea of documents
Could you elaborate?
I think what you are sayin’ is people use Office documents because everyone does. Which is true.
I have a painful history with office .doc’, and a still annoying history with .docx. In my branch of science, we had to submit nearly every paper as .docx because journals required this (i.e. because reviewers use MS Office). Even in prep, I had to do everything in .docx because my co-authors refused to work in anything else.
Don’t get me wrong, I think MS is doing quite a good job for most purposes with the Office suite. However, of you ever tried to work seriously with it, you have hit the limitations yourself, surely.
They will loose the advantages of “everyone knows how to use office docx’ses”, eventually. That’s for sure.
