I realize that businesses must run daily operations and that requires them to bite the bullet and pay the "Microsoft tax". A municipality should think a bit about if some operational problems have a price tag of 90 million euros annually.
Like for example my sister. Her husband works for Redhat so he enthusiastically installed Linux on her notebook, LO and everything. She worked as a professional writer, and it was a real struggle... some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them... then spell-checker wasn't as good as in MS Word (non-English language), etc. The cost of this solution was quite high, and she eventually gave up and installed Windows.
I am not trying to trash Linux or LO, it would be great to have open-source alternatives to everything, but in certain areas (Office, Adobe products, etc), such alternative doesn't exists and fighting against reality doesn't make it.
I like that! I send you a document you can't open: your fault. You send me a document I can't open: your fault too.
Try the same thing in any other industry and you'll get the same result. "You created the problem: you deal with it."
Which is survivable if your time has no value. If you're paying people serious wages to do this stuff, the costs are dramatically higher than just buying Windows and Office.
When I was in the full-time editing business, sending me unreadable documents more than once would not be a good way to get further commissions.
Office 365 easily pays for itself in saving a few minutes per day.
Any evidence for this? I specifically remember one article talking about Excel's file format that was engineered in a way as to run on extremely resource-limited computers - those available when office was first released. Any complexities had to be built on top of that legacy base, and be backwards compatible.
That seems to more than explain the file-format complexity, without unsubstantiated allegations of deliberate obfuscation.