What would it take to make LibreOffice a web-centric app companies could host themselves? Maybe Apache's resources could be directed that way.
But I'm old and my 14yo son never saw even MS Word (leave along LibreOffice) until I showed it to him, they do everything in Google Docs and that's all they know. So maybe I'm part of a dying breed :-)
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/
It is integrated into NextCloud I believe for self-hosting
Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microsoft+word...
Note that 2010 is the year that MS first started adding cloud-based collaborative tools to MS word, reducing the downward trend.
I enjoy using it and it has been a life savior for the times I need to work on a document with someone else since I can just send them a share link for it. The fact that it uses leaflet which is meant for maps does mean that the latency to the server matters quite a lot to experience but I don't mind that much, personally, with my not great 120ms RTT to my server.
They have a downside for privacy and security.
What I'd really like is on office suite that lives on my own device (e.g. my router), where I own my data. That's not the way the world went, but c'est la vie.
I think the fact that I'm The first person to mention it here, and the fact you didn't find it yourself, is revealing about the true level of demand for such a product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synology
The products menu on their web page doesn't mention it.
https://www.synology.com/en-us
IF you go to Solutions -> Data Management -> Office, you find it. One more link, and you're there:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/office
Of course, there's no way to try it or to buy it from there....
I see random devices for sale for under $200, but I'm not sure if they include it. If I bought it, I'm not sure how well it works.
We have no idea of the level of demand for a product that well-hidden. The fact I just spent 5-10 minutes without figuring trying to figure this out without success means we have no idea.
As a footnote, I do have a random machine running a random online office suite. It works, but not well enough to be generally usable.
What if you could host it on your laptop or a server you pay for?
When I suggested something a company could host I imagined it replacing Office 365 or Google Docs (a concern governments may have about having American companies host their data). Being able to self host and allow collaboration without relying on a third party application is important.
I'd much rather send documents back and forth, with comments I integrate with the material. If I _need_ to do something live, plain text is actually not just perfectly sufficient - it's either _exactly_ what I want, or what I want is a white board (and therefore please let's just use self-hosted Excalidraw - but remember to sponsor it if you're commercial!).
But outside of very rare occasions, let's just set up a plain old mailing list, write proposals in basic text, and then once we have something complete, let one person integrate the whole thing into a single pretty document with like LaTeX or Markdown or something. Or even Word, I don't really care.
And yes, that's hostile to brainstorming. Good. I too am hostile to brainstorming.