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Comment by hvgk | Hacker News Reader

You don’t have to use their crap. I don’t.

It is chosen by businesses and individuals because it’s about the only complete solution out there (even if it is a monumental shit show) which is cost effective. Either that or they are ignorant or genuinely like it.

The EU tech sector needs to build something better. LibreOffice and Linux as it stands is not it. I tried over and over again to use it but it’s just not good.

I’m lurking in the leper colony of iCloud, Sheets and Numbers for reference and do most of my stuff on iOS. It’s different but not better.

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The point is not that the people aware of the situation can avoid using these services, the point is that Microsoft (just like Apple and Google) is abusing its control over the OS to entice millions of people to use their own services. This is not an even market, competition is distorted. How could better competitors emerge in such situation? As if the unlimited fundings these companies have was not enough.

Why shouldn't a company promote its own products? It is not "abuse of control", that is such bullshit. Also I have been using Windows for decades and never touched MS Office or Teams. It's not that hard.

Why shouldn't companies agree to work together for mutual benefit, like tech companies agreeing to hold down wages, like they did recently. Or is that too 'free market'?

Fine by me, actually. What exactly is the rationale for making disallowing such a thing? Unions are doing the same thing, btw.

You seem to be unfamiliar with the absolute basics of cartels, collusion and antitrust law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

What is the point of your comment? I am aware that there were agreements between the companies. My question was what is the rationale behind making such a thing illegal. Your link doesn't answer that question.

Its a bit like asking why stabbings are illegal everywhere, from Switzerland to Vietnam.

Because that's nor a market, that mafia rule.

What the fuck no it is not the same. Stabbings are murder. At the very least you can argue with Kant's imperative that you shouldn't do what you don't want others to do to you. It seems to me agreeing not to poach other companies employees is more in the line with Kant's imperative. If anything, poaching other companies employees would be more like murder. Society seems to already have realized that, that is why they call it "poaching".

"poaching other companies employees would be more like murder."

If you consider improving someone's quality of life by offering better salary to be 'like murder', and do not recognise that cartels, illegal in every civilised nation, are bad for the economy, then I cannot fathom what I could possibly write to get through to you

Not all economists agree that cartels are bad. Also they are usually about prices for selling stuff, not for buying stuff (as in buying employees). Just because companies have agreements doesn't make it a cartel. It would be stupid if companies wouldn't be allowed to have agreements.

And as mentioned before, workers cartels (unions) seem to be legal in most "civilized" places.

Or think about another example: poaching somebodies wife. That also seems to be frowned upon in many places. Yet, it is just an agreement that nobody should make somebody else's wife a better offer.

People tend to forget with all those rules that they could also be on the receiving end of things. You may not be a worker forever, maybe one of these days you want to become independent and run your own company. It would be a shame if people effectively weren't allowed to do so anymore.

This is cartoonishly unreal... like it was written by an evil villain.

Wait until you realize unions sometimes are legalized cartels of employees.

It seems like (anecdotally) there's a decent number of shops that are 100% linux for servers, except there will still be an AD + Exchange setup because there's really no comprehensive solution in the open source world, like you said.

That is exactly how my employer works. I use O365 outlook web access begrudgingly.

I didn't think I (as an experienced software engineer) would struggle so much to save a file until I had to use Office 365. I wish Dropbox was more popular in your average small business office.

Oh yes that’s a nightmare. They turned saving a file into a kafkaesque dystopian hell hole.

This is one of the things I like about Numbers etc on iOS. It abstracts this away so we’ll I don’t have to give a crap and it appears instantly on all my devices.

Can you elaborate, for those unfamiliar with Office 365?

In general it boils down to "the distributed storage is buggy/not performant".

The standard experience I want as a user is that my "cloud" files should be treated like my "local" files. However, in practice this is not the case. There are constantly syncing issues, files go missing from device or another, old versions appear/disappear randomly, the syncing server can't connect for a very long time (say upwards of 20+ minutes), etc. etc. And of course as Murphy would have it, this usually happens around the time where you critically need to share files across machines with a client or something. It's just generally a really frustrating experience.

> The EU tech sector needs to build something better. LibreOffice and Linux as it stands is not it. I tried over and over again to use it but it’s just not good.

Can you elaborate?

I have had quite a nice experience on the Linux ecosystem and with LibreOffice too.

But there's usually a point where you realize that "this should've been a script" ™. I do concede that Excel pushes that point further down the road with what I remember to be better performance when working with bigger files, but by no means something so drastic.

Well in my case there is always something hideously broken. For example I had a problem a couple of years back where libreoffice would take 3 minutes to open a sheet when my printer was turned on. Then there’s days where if I close the lid on the laptop I had to pray to all the gods of the disc that it’d wake up again without smiting me in some horrible way. And then there’s the usual face punch where I just want to solve a problem, not solve a whole tree of problems.

I don’t work on anything exceptional really. It’s all simple stuff. But there’s just so many broken things all the time that I had to walk away.

I’m writing this on the only tool I’ve got that doesn’t melt in my hands regularly, an ass end 9th gen ipad paired with a fairly old apple keyboard. It just works. This gives me more time to do things I actually derive value from in my life.

>Can you elaborate?

https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/hioivn/libreoffice_is_st...

> But there's usually a point where you realize that "this should've been a script" ™.

There is less accountability for essential business functions that a product provides.

To be fair Microsoft have no accountability either. But it’s easier to tick the ISO 27001 or SOC compliance box when they pretend they have some accountability.

I'm holding for now, but the pressure to start using GitHub and LinkedIn keeps growing...

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