The New Word Processor Wars: A Fresh Crop of Productivity Apps Are Trying To Reinvent Our Workday

Nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's iWork, you're still following the Microsoft model. But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. GeekWire:

There's a new war on over the way we work, and the old 'office suite' is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords in tech have been 'AI' and 'mobile.' Today, you can add 'collaboration' to that list -- these days, everybody wants to build Slack-like communication into their apps.

For notes and docs, there's Quip, Notejoy, Slite, Zenkit, Notion and Agenda. For spreadsheets, there's Bellevue, Wash.-based Smartsheet, as well as Airtable, Coda and, although it's a very different take on the spreadsheet, Trello. The list goes on seemingly ad infinitum, largely thanks to the relative ease with which developers can launch software in the cloud. 'Work has totally changed,' said Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, the online storage company that is building its strategy around unifying data and messaging from a dizzying mix of cloud apps. 'Employees were lucky to have two, three, five modern applications in the 90s. Now they have almost unlimited ways of being productive.'

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