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Comment by frockington1 | Hacker News Reader

So the entire EU is going to be forced to use Open Office or some other equivalent? Non tech people will hate this and it will cripple many businesses that rely on Microsoft Excel. You'd be surprised how much of the world economy is based on emailing Excel sheets back and forth

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> You'd be surprised how much of the world economy is based on emailing Excel sheets back and forth

How would Excel being run locally, with its work product being emailed back and forth, be impacted by this?

You can use MS Office without putting everything on the cloud. Excel doesn't need to go, and you can still use Excel online for calculations that don't include personal information, which should suffice for most businesses.

Just don't upload that CSV containing all of your customers to Microsoft, that shouldn't be too hard.

> Just don't upload that CSV containing all of your customers to Microsoft, that shouldn't be too hard.

Have you ever worked in a large organization?

This is a good thing. It means Europe will be forced to invest in improving open office, pay for development etc.

Fair enough, but until then, EU companies just won't be able to do business anymore?

You are assuming that these businesses are using online versions of Excel (or whatever) that store the data under US jurisdiction. If they have committed to using online services that rely on US storage, then they have made a bad mistake - that is not allowed, and this case just reaffirms that.

Is Microsoft no longer making a desktop version of their office suite?

The EU institutions (that came up with this crap) are so bad at managing their hard & software (2 years in to the pandemic, their employees are still WFH on MS tablets with VPN connections that are super unstable).

I can't wait to see the clusterfuck of them trying to migrate away from MS.

Why not now force the EU to heavily invest in libreoffice so that it becomes a drop replacement to excel? I'm sure the European union can spare some euros to make it possible and this isn't even a utopian dream that can't be achieved. It just needs a good push

> Why not now force the EU to heavily invest in libreoffice so that it becomes a drop replacement to excel?

The history of this strategy working, versus becoming a job/contract bank for cronies over time, is very poor in the long run. Regardless of the political system which attempts it.

if you were to be given a chance to decide if we want to stay proprietary, continue allowing crony companies to steal data while charging us money for that privilege, what would you do. i want to know what you think is the alternative

I like the theory however, I don't think a state owned and funded initiative could ever compete with Microsoft/Google/Amazon etc....

I'd rather have my money spent in allowing a fiscal and investment frame so we don't have to think of this top-down approach to everything everytime.

fiscal and investment frame means what exactly?

How exactly would you do that? EU institutions are notoriously unaccountable.

Besides, EU bodies just make the rules. They don't need to provide actionable alternatives or even have to comply with those rules themselves.

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