Could EN ever replace Microsoft Office?

[kevind3207 1]

It sounds crazy, right. How could a lowly note-taking system that doesn't have any spreadsheet capabilities replace Microsoft Office?

 

But I think eventually EN, or at least, a different kind of organizational system could unseat Office someday.

 

The more time goes on, and the more computing evolves, the more and more dumb Microsoft Office looks. Here's a few things I see that are really starting to add up.

 

1. The artificial segmentation of two applications (I'll focus solely on Word and Excel), one that handles paragraphs of text and one that handles columns of numbers doesn't make much sense any more. Isn't it all just content? It made sense when computers had limited memory, but now with the cloud, can't I just have one good app that does it all? Microsoft recognized this problem 20 years ago and tried to solve it with OLE, but OLE isn't cross-platform or mobile-friendly, and it doesn't make much sense in a cloud-based world.

 

2. Documents stored as separate files vs. in a database. If I have each document in a separate file, I can't easily use or link content from other files. Office has some cross-file referencing capabilities, but they're convoluted and don't work on mobile devices that don't have file systems. In a cloud-based world, storing collections of documents in a database makes more sense.

 

3. Static, fixed-sized content vs. dynamic, resizable content. Office is good at the former, but the future belongs to the latter.

 

Thoughts?

[s2sailor 1,097]

If you are interested, there is a similar discussion going on here.