Good luck getting 30+ years of experience in writing Office software (and then porting it to the cloud) with an EU startup.
Web versions of software still sometimes feel like an attempt to sell a fraction of the feature set from 1995 in a laggy, less polished interface as an improvement.
That, and using an order of magnitude more hardware resources and leaking memory everywhere until your computer runs out of RAM. I have yet to find a browser which, with JavaScript enabled, will let me use it for more than a few hours without filling my RAM.
So I'm saying it should be doable, theoretically. Starting from scratch might be an opportunity here, not an impediment.
The problem is, our politicians are either bought-off, digitally incompetent or irrelevant (sorry, Die PARTEI and Pirates, you're good but you're too small).
its wishful thinking or marketing to imagine that LibreOffice is anywhere near this... or Google Docs.
For trivial documents - fine - any processor can do some work. For serious work - MS Office and most likely the desktop version of the app. And after all how did suddenly all desktop apps become obsolete? Well, they are not.
We need a set of stand-alone Office alternatives which are fully cross-platform (so, Electron), backwards compatible with Excel spreadsheets and also offering more advanced no-code functionality, and for the Word/PowerPoint equivalents something with the power of LaTeX but an easy to use WYSIWYG fall-back.
Is that really so much to ask?...
Yes. You cited requirements that to be satisfied together require a huge effort. You want something that can "just work" and is also cross-platform, power user friendly (LaTeX), and should be snappy to be able to gain traction. Not to mention that you have to compete with the ecosystem lockin of Office-Teams-Onedrive-Sharepoint-Azure.
I frankly see no way a competitive alternative could appear without a billion dollar budget backing it.
Which is one reason we don't need Microsoft's Office365 offer at all? I mean, especially in the case of big governments/orgs where they operate an entire fleet of machines, providing good desktop software would be a much better experience than crappy webapps.
Unless of course the goal is real-time collaboration, in which case that's an entirely different use-case and i have no idea how google/microsoft tools fare in this space (but Hedgedoc/Cryptpad are solid).
The real-time collaboration is vastly overrated mostly, and thanks to Google's marketing. How many times have anyone had to do a real-time edit of document. How many times it was crucial for the process. And how is this better than git push/pulls?
Well, there are some 5% of all cases where real-time collaboration on a document is good to have, but 95% of all times is reasonably OK to share a screen and have few people stand right by the side of s.o. performing actions.
Still, as all -1 Earth goverments was doing nothing in last 40 years, it is now time to start ! Let it take 20 - 30 years - so what ?
Ok, -2 - China tried to create Windows clone from scratch and failed. Instead MS wrote them social-spying-for-credit system...
Why I say it's govs work and not some company or "startup" LOL ? Becouse of scope or more precise: users expectations.
In that last 40 years just Sun tried to do something sensible and we own them a lot.
So plan should be:
- build on package installable on premise
- many implementations - even few per nations - will not be a mistake. We have open formats in that century...
- client-server model, with server running on host or somewhere on LAN / VPN
- security included from day one, not "to be added later"
- drop http and browsers and rebuild this part, too much bullshit accumulated. After all it's just protocol stack. And we have 30 years long timeframe for it ! Browsers are too stagnated.
- do not include in planning stage peoples involved in "cookie consent" massacre... Looks like listening to American corporations ends like this. Tell them what to do and they will possibly do the best.
- assign funds NOW for next 50 years of incremental development
- make own CPUs, each nation / big company own. And build C compiler for that CPU. Make sure Linux or Minix work on it
Yes, somehow Americans are best with building many things but instantly as they got total control they mess it up. And then keep messing it more !
So let build things, make new good standards and then let Americans join ! :)
China created their own government Linux distribution. Every country should do exactly that.
They should adapt the sensible stuff, the innovation from China. Not the totalitarian crap like mass surveillance. But that is a feature set I expect to see in MS products in the future. This is an automatism for the company by now.
Most of these companies hire mediocre developers in small numbers because of budget constraints and then work on their product on borrowed time until the EU seed money runs out.
Not everyone desires to move to the US to get a Silicon Valley-level salary and sacrifice their Quality of Life for it.
Electricians in the US easily make over $70k early on, and over $100k with in a few years. And that isn't even the best paying trade job.
An experienced Programmer easily can get a job making 120k+, and that isn't even in the valley.
That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road. But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids. Along with that you have idiots that think trump was the second coming of jesus. And do nothing more than cry about thing that will only hurt them in the long run.
The median pay for electricians in the US is $56,900; the cutoff for the top 10% is under $100K [0], which is quite inconsistent with them “easily” making $70K early on and $100K within a few years.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/mobile/e...
Any Journeymen not taking home north of $65k should be looking for another job, as their employer is screwing them over. There simply isn't enough of them and employers will gladly pay for someone experienced to join their work force. Even with the recent massive pay increases it is hard to keep people from going somewhere else for even higher pay.
A website like that doesn't really keep up with what is really happening in a field like that. $100K/year working 50-60hours a week is not uncommon.
Which is a thoroughly unsustainable way of living. I like walking and biking, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice them and the practicality of having everything within a walking/biking/public transit distance for more house and yard maintenance.
> But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids.
And takes a mental toll having to worry about that kind of thing. I don't want to be afraid to go to the doctor.
Taking advantage of money is exactly what you want to do. Money will make you more money. So not having money working for you only works to keep you down. The more money you have working for you, the more it makes in a given part of time. Want to create generational wealth, you'll need to make as much $$ as you possibly can and teach your kids how to keep growing their chunk after you pass.
As someone that grew up in a lower middle class home where extra cash just didn't exist. My dedication in life is to make my children set in life. I was lucky enough to find a career path to allow for such entitlement. No it is not a sad life, its only sad if said money is purely for self indulgement.
No I wouldn't and there are dozens of (less comical) examples where I draw the line.
The actual Hospitals and Doctors in America have always been hands down better. Its only if you can afford it. Really any top tier Silicon Valley job is going to come with pretty good heath insurance. The Subpar Healthcare is more or less a poor person problem. Nothing like destroying net worth like having to go to the doctor with sub par insurance. Getting 3-6K+ in bills over a few nonsense visits.
Like I said before I wouldn't move to America either. But to think the EU isn't a$$ Backwards in many ways would be an understatement. I lived in the UK for 3 years, and like most of Europe school system is a hit or miss depending on location. Private Schooling is not uncommon in America for that reason.
This in part is why Americans in higher level careers (family's with income of 120K+) tend to retire with more money in their retirement accounts than their EU brothers. Nearly all my Fellow successful 30yo's had over 50K in their 401k when they turned 30. The ones that didn't are ones that will most likely always jump around to different entry level jobs.
I can assure you some of the brightest people i know are paid a misery in your standards, first of which researchers working for public universities. Free software "consulting" companies like Collabora are also filled with brilliant people.
On the other hand, i don't think i know a single person that gets paid high salary (> 2000-3000€/mo) that does anything useful for society at large or has an interesting skillset. Those are usually managers or Chief Whatever Officers, and i believe the whole society would fare much better without them.
Trying to equate skill/usefulness with salary is a doomed enterprise. You'd be surprised with the knowledge and skills of some janitors cleaning your office, if you ever talk to them.