It's the rise of local tech. If I migrate off Amazon, where do I migrate to? My house is an acceptable answer for some, but also my local ISP has a colo. Unfortunately then you have to manage that, and have a person, and soon, you've reinvented the cloud, just on your terms. Which isn't a bad thing, but that's what involved.

> OnlyOffice

Best Latvian office suite?

The main reason there's nothing better is just that everyone is using ms office.

Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.

But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.

Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.

As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.

"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.

Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.

Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.

Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.

I think all 365 subscriptions give you access to the real desktop apps? Word and Excel desktop remain class leading on the desktop.

But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?

If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?

I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.

That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."

I find that people who demand or complain about training tends to be a really good filter for people that are hard to work with or intellectually incurious.

Maybe you shouldn't have had divorce papers be the example document she started with

Have you seen CraftApps [0]? They are "clean room" implementations of MS Word (WordCraft), MS Excel (GridCraft) and MS PowerPoint (DeckCraft), among others.

[0] https://getartcraft.com/apps

It might actually have been Libra. It was part of the whole get away from MS thing.

>…That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years

The last OpenOffice release was 10 days ago. Not 12 years.

https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html

> Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today

This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.

> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.

If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.

Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.

Why should an incompatibility between X and Y be blamed solely on X?

AI agents can make quick work of a task like this and build out a bespoke script to get it done. However, at that point you’ve shifted a 365 subscription cost to a Claude subscription cost (and you also get Copilot usage with either of the 365 plans anyway).

When you can use your software without the USA government snooping your data.

MIT encourages future commerical capture. I can download your MIT source and go make a company and a million dollars, and you don't get shit. GPL is what you want if you don't want commercial entities to be able to use your code and then run off and make a ton of money and never have to release the source code.

I get where these places are coming from - it is really easy to get started implementing these workflows in Excel and just grow it from there. But they are really fragile and hard to audit - who knows whether they work correctly even now! And it's highly likely that only very few people actually understand how they work and how to maintain and extend them. Great for job security, but there is going to be a lot of problems when the people who know them are not available anymore. Better to transition the embedded knowledge to something more maintainable as long as it's still possible.

I interviewed at a job with quite a lot of maths to do. I never worked in that industry, but I made a good profolio using Jupyter notebooks so I got an interview. Turns out everything was done in Excel, they asked me a few times how good I was with Excel. It seems they are not impressed with an answer of “Yea, that’s easy, I do my personal budgeting with it”

Exactly. Especially the backwards compatibility. You can have sheets from decades ago still giving useful results.

That's not true, it adds innuendo.

Or the horrifying American Fruit Company (Chiquita now) in South America ?

It's all set forth under section 1, 'Notice of invasion', subsection 3, 'conditional treatment of natives'.

then perhaps they can contribute to it?

The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.

100%. Most people are not programmers. Most people do not see software as something interesting to figure out. It's just a tool for them to do their job.

To get the average office worker to want to switch, you not only have to provide a finished product that works smoothly, but also one that feels familiar. Most office workers grind through their day doing repetitive tasks in familiar software they have been using for a decade. When the top of the food chain says they are overhauling the entire software suite that people have been grown accustomed to for their entire career, the new software better have real benefits that incentivise employees to actually engage with learning it. Otherwise productivity will simply crater.

Most office workers do not care to learn new software. They just want to get on with their job. For better or for worse. But if you can demonstrate a switch will make their lives easier and the UI UX of the new software is very familiar and intuitive (and it actually works) you may be able to pull off a clean switch and keep your employees happy.

An MVP is fine but I think it's crucial that the UI UX is very similar to the software that it is replacing because it means people don't have to relearn whatever habits they have developed over the years in the old stack. I think that's what creates the most resistance to change.

This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.

The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.

With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.

The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).

But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).

Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...

> Absolute shit.

> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.

EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.

The issue with building alternatives is always that it is quite easy to get something that can do 90% or more of the work, but the remainder takes a lot more time to pull off.

Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.

The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.

People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.

You can't clone decades of history.

> Now that software is cheap

Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.

Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.

That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.

Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.

It will come the day open source developers prioritize the same things enterprises and governments do.

It's a spreadsheet app (cells) that's free. FreeCell. I mostly thought it was funny.

The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.

THIS should be the top comment. So much of our value comes from those bespoke VBA bowls of spaghetti code that get shit done perfectly the same way for the past 20 years that keep the business going. Even the big banks are like this. Someone else said “load bearing excel sheet” that’s pretty good.

Have you tried opening a big excel file in it? It's actually more pleasant than doing so in Excel (because it's a lot faster than Excel, even on very fast systems. And just that makes it great for financial applications, you know, abusing Excel as a database)