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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

TCO was also a big part of the marketing campaign of Microsoft against Linux in the late 90ies, early 00s.

A big difference compared to one or two decades ago is that a lot of domain-specific services have moved to web applications. So, there are probably a lot of machines out there that are just glorified web browsing machines.

Also, the popularity of iOS and Android have made more applications cross-platform.

Of course, once Office documents or legacy Win32 applications are part of the equation, you can't really beat Windows. It is a common misconception that LibreOffice could replace Office. I use a Linux desktop and a MacBook and most of the Word/Excel paperwork that I have to do (luckily irregularly) does not open correctly in LibreOffice. Of course, it is an uphill battle for the LO folks.

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I’ve switched to libreoffice from excel and find it totally viable as an excel replacement except for lack of vba support, but it has its own scripting language so even that isn’t a deal breaker. It’s just so much faster and less bloated than today’s excel.

For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

The only way to break out of this, I think, is for governments to forbid themselves to use proprietary software that was not developed on their own soil. Because let's face it, it's not really about money (especially not about short term money). It's more about national security, sovereignty, and freedom.

And for why that's important: business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

Dealing with this at work now.

And it's not like they're disinterested or incapable of learning, literally no one thought "Gee, what those folks are doing looks a lot like code."

The biggest boost to interop would be requiring software vendors to release spec sheets for necessary software components and file formats... if they want government work. No more "It's too hard" or "We can't." You want the job, those are the rules.

> business teams who generate business-critical Excel sheets never got the memo about good ideas from the software development lifecycle. And have been cobbling together undocumented tools to get work done for decades.

So, business teams invented the all-too-common version of agile development even before “real” software developers, without the disadvantage of ignorance of the body of knowledge around the SDLC, got around to it.

The Excel file format has been a publicly released open standard for years.

There's a document that ostensibly describes the format, but I'm not aware of a free software reference implementation. Their format may be open in theory, but in practice Microsoft still takes advantage of vendor lock in.

> By that criteria (which are real criteria from real people), the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office, is the next version of Microsoft Office.

By that criteria, the only viable replacement for Microsoft Office is the _same_ version of Microsoft Office.

The delta between two Microsoft Office versions has often been larger than between a Microsoft Office version and a LibreOffice version...

But the two MS Office versions both have a Microsoft logo on them. People will grumble, but get used to the new version, whereas if you give them something with a different logo, they will scream bloody murder and demand that you get rid of that weird program and give them back their Office programs.

This kind of condescension is why people hate tech people. Is it any wonder they don't want to use Linux with sentiments like this being so common?

EDIT:

Perceived change generates just as much stress and associated opposition as actual change. You've just enabled me to make that explicit for myself. I feel stupid that took me so many years. Thank you for that.

Writing this out somewhat softens my frustration with people refusing to use anything but the blue e or similar intellectual laziness.

Have seen this exact problem get fixed by using the little blue E icon for Firefox.

Walk a mile in our shoes. You understand truths about your job we may not.

Where in my comment did you see any opinion being expressed? I merely described something that I encountered many, many times. You do not have to believe me, that is up to you.

Not everything is an adversarial thing about two opposing groups of people.

Condescension does not change the fact that that’s an accurate description of the behaviour of some people, any more than it would change a left wing sneer at right wingers who think climate change isn’t a big deal, or a right wing sneer at left wingers who think evolution in humans stopped at the neck.

Well, newer MS Office versions are still 100% file-compatible with older versions.

(With compatibility packages)

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly. For some users, it even means the GUI is just about the same so they don't feel lost.

Citation needed.

The company I work for switched wholesale away from Microsoft. Management moved first and the rest of us shortly afterwards. Haven't heard any complaints.

And the companies I worked with repeatedly stated that they couldn't possibly switch away because their clients (often the government itself) was using a particular version of MS Office. This often meant we had to use several versions of MS Office, depending on who we were interacting with.

The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

> The company you work for is one of the enlightened few. Or maybe it's a tech company with an enlightened management?

It is. We are a tech/consulting company, but management is management and we also have a good number of employees older than me (and I think that is great :-)

> For most users, "replacement" mean it can open and edit Microsoft's documents perfectly.

For that use case, there's always SoftMaker Office[1].

1 - https://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

Sorry, I was implying free software only. The "free trial" I see on the front page looks proprietary.

Yeah, it is, unfortunately. But the question then becomes, is it better for them to use GNU software and Linux, with maybe one or two closed-source apps, which they could migrate from over time, or use Windows and everything proprietary, even if the only use case LO doesn't cover is opening MS Office files 'perfectly' (yet)?

Unluckily in my case Libreoffice Calc (using it privately) is a lot slower when using formulas than MS Excel (using it for work).

Linux workstations, Office 365 -- skip LibreOffice.

In my experience O365 office web applications are no competition even for Libre/OpenOffice. Has that changed lately?

Try OnlyOffice. Works a lot better re compatibility with office files IMHO.

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