I think convenience is the keyword. Users (not us HN crowd, the rest of the world) don't want to struggle with installing software, most of them don't know the difference between Internet, Browser, or "app".

They just open up "internet" and work on docs, and for 99% of the cases Google Docs works fine despite running in a browser that is much less efficient than a native "app". For most cases it's more than enough for the regular user who is used to "computers being slow" anyway.

Wait, is it true? Did you encounter a bug? or browser extensions issues? It may not be as efficient as native, but I downloaded some sample files and repeated them until hit Google Docs limits. It is about 450 pages with some images. It is smooth and usable. There's zero delay. (and only 1000MB ram usage with many broswer extensions enabled. I think it's fair...)

“My father told me he wanted Microsoft Word on his laptop. So I told him to use Google Docs instead. When that turned out to suck, I installed Libre Office instead.”

Why didn’t you just, like, get him Word? Why did you make him try to use a shitty web app that assumes everyone’s computer is brand new, then install an open-source program that’s going to be constantly playing catch-up with Word’s updates and may cause problems down the line when Dad wants to work with someone else’s Word docs?

Maybe there was a perfectly good reason for this choice. I can think of a few. Maybe you helped Dad enter The Year Of Linux On The Desktop recently. Maybe Dad didn’t want to pay for Office. Who knows. Whatever the reason, you didn’t put it in this post. And you ended it with a plug for your completely unrelated SAAS, too.

In the early 90s, I believe MS Word came on a few floppy disks and the main executable was 2MB. It ran fine on a 16Mhz 386 with a total of 2MB RAM (let that sink in!)

It did pretty much everything it does now, only lacked a grammar checker. (WordPerfect had one.)

Now we measure things in GB units. 1000X bigger, but what was gained?

We not only lost the way, we don’t even know the destination any more.