On: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

[rakkhi]

> "Word or Excel teams use any other word processor or spreadsheet."

Reinforces your point and his. Word and Excel are best in class, nothing else comes close - OpenOffice, Google Docs, Documents to go on mobiles are ok substitutes but not as good as the real thing. This as real impact on your productivity which is why I use office.live.com, can't believe that is free at the moment.

[gaius → rakkhi]

I'm not sure it's comparable: the work of making Visual Studio is much the same as the work that people would do with Visual Studio. But if you are a Word developer, while you'd use it to write a letter, you might not have much experience of using it for a truly large document, like an entire book.

[rakkhi → gaius]

Maybe not an entire book but might you not read/write a large requirements or design document, set of test scripts before it goes into Quality centre for example. Write-up a lessons learned document or review a threat model for a security push before the new version gets launched?

[gaius → rakkhi]

Even so you would not be the typical Word user, who may be very smart and an expert in their field, but know nothing about computers.