> Here's a recent interview with Christian Ude[...]

This is a really interesting interview, unfortunately it is only available in German so I translated (with the help of deepl) the part about the situation right after the switch.

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Linux-Magazin: How big was the pressure afterwards?

[...]

Christian Ude: The most intense thing I personally experienced was a visit from Steve Ballmer, after all Vice President of Microsoft. He interrupted his skiing holiday in Switzerland to visit me. With his well-known enthusiasm, with which he dynamically jumps around on stage at conferences, he jumped around in my office and first of all praised the beauty of Munich. But then he said that I was making a catastrophic decision that I could never justify to anyone, especially not to a taxpayer.

Funnily enough, he constantly made new financial offers during the conversation, he talked about what Microsoft would add for free, for the school department for example. On and on he reduced the price, one million and a another million and a another million and a dozen million cheaper than before. This is how important Munich - which is internationally perceived as an IT center - was to Microsoft as a symbol.

Would [Munich] walk a new path or repentantly return into Microsoft's lap? We have calculated that Ballmer has improved the financial offer by around 35 per cent. But since we wanted to make a strategic decision and not just make a price comparison, this was not important to us.

Linux-Magazin: Bill Gates also came to visit?

Christian Ude: He was in Munich because of a presentation of the "House of the Future", which inspired him insanely. With it, you could determine from your car how high the room temperature in each room is and whether the refrigerator should defrost a bit. On his way back to the airport I had the opportunity to talk to him. So I sat together with one of the richest men in the world in a camouflaged van, which was luxuriously equipped inside, but looked from the outside as if it belonged to a small craft business. Gates asked me stunned: "Why are you doing this? That's absurd! That's incomprehensible!

Now that I'm not the hard-boiled IT specialist who could stand up to a Bill Gates in every detail, I just said:

"Please note, we're all about independence. We don't want to be dependent."

Then he said, "That's nonsense, who do you depend on?"

"Now that you are here [I can tell you]: From you, of course!"

That really made him collapse, and he said: "It's incomprehensible to me, it's ideology".

You can pry excel from my cold dead hands. I try to use LO regularly but it can't even come close to meeting my needs, for example handling very large tables. The only response I get from LO boosters is "You're using it wrong. Teach sql to all of your front line office workers, or don't do what you want to do." meanwhile excel does what I want it do do.