Everything in the post can by explained by "People think the familiar is easy, and the novel is hard."
Judged by the standards of a programmer, yes, the suggested solutions are simpler. Judged by the non-technical coworker's standards, no, they are new and therefore scary and harder. You might say, "If they expended even 5 minutes of effort, they would not feel that way." But that's 5 minutes more than just using the thing they're used to.
The interesting part to me is, these "non-technical" coworkers aren't proposing simpler solutions. When reading "Why couldn't you just do this in something simple like Word?", Word isn't what I'd call a simple program from any angle.
It's not preinstalled on most computers and costs money, it won't run everywhere (running Word on a school provided Chromebook is a world of fun), for decades it had version compatibility issues, and the current version has an UI that would make an airliner pilot feel right at home.
To me most people in the corporate environment are highly technical and have arcane knowledge of crazy complicated tools and workflows. Just not _our_ tools and workflows.
And yes, I also don't want to go buy an Office license, install Word, learn how to deal with the commenting options, what format I should save the file back, when some random person sends me a Word file. So we're all pretty alike I think.
> The interesting part to me is, these "non-technical" coworkers aren't proposing simpler solutions.
This.
I still keep wondering why that is. My two theories are that it is either marketing budgets or that there are many visual thinkers who benefit a lot from UIs.
If it is the former, the Markdown is actually better than Word and we should teach it in schools. Bit if the latter theory is correct, people are different and trying to teach everyone Markdown would be counter-productive.
Not knowing which theory is correct means I don't know what to advocate for.
the bit after the part you quoted
> (running Word on a school provided Chromebook is a world of fun)
Many orgs work on Google accounts, so asking for a microsoft account is an additional hurdle. It also probably requires I upload the files to my OneDrive. I had a look at the interface and had no idea how to just open a document I have locally.
I get your point that it's totally doable (and also free up to some point. The OneDrive space is the limit ?). I'm not convinced it's simple though.
This is the case even among highly technical and otherwise competent programmers. Junior developers especially will spend days reinventing wheels in whatever hot new language or framework when a better solution can be had in 5 minutes of reading a manpage. There seems to be nothing I can do to convince these devs of the errors of their ways.
This is different though. When junior developers reinvent wheels they are learning. The challenge here is to not put the results into production but still make it feel impactful.
Judged by the standards of a programmer, yes, the suggested solutions are simpler. Judged by the non-technical coworker's standards, no, they are new and therefore scary and harder. You might say, "If they expended even 5 minutes of effort, they would not feel that way." But that's 5 minutes more than just using the thing they're used to.