Friction vs. Features

Posted by Paul Korm
Mar 17, 2023 at 01:45 AM

If software makes it easy to quickly start new, or open an existing document, and get going. And then continue writing without lag. Then it’s low friction.

Having written tens of thousands of pages in Word, I would say it for me is the lowest friction app I have. Just writing that feels like heresy. Yes, Word is bulked out with nightmarish ribbons, menus, confusing commands and features, but for basic just-get-it-down-and-fiddle-later writing, it serves me well. I’ve used it so much for so long that I don’t even see the cruft when I’m engaged in writing.

It’s interesting that a few tens of thousands of people use Obsidian (their claim), which a few hundred million people use Word (their claim). It can’t all be bad.