That's a really bad argument when history shows the inverse.
Name a FOSS program that no longer exists and I will give you 5 proprietary programs that suffered the same.
Even in the same lineage as Teams there is: Communicator, Lync and Skype for Business.
Now, they simply do not exist.
However I can still run `vim` from the 80s and OpenOffice from the mid-00's without issue, even if there is limited support: it still works.
When we discuss education, we must also look at what the world does, not just what we -wish- it did. It's cheaper for the schools to have O365 licenses than singular program license for various products that helps to power the global economy. Just like you wouldn't teach a kid command line on some new experimental OS, you'd teach them on UNIX or Windows, same thing. The whole point of schooling is to build real world skills. Much of the O365 suite is used widely, so are some GSuite products. It's just the reality, like it or not.
they're not optional.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/find-commands-easily-in-word-20...
I can easily imagine a world where other office apps are shutdown, you have the golden children like Excel, Word, Outlook and Powerpoint. Which change UI and design language or change features over the years.
Then there's things like Office Whiteboard, VIVA, Bookings, Lists, Planner, Power Automate, Yammer, Sway. Who knows how long they'll last?- even mainstays such as Microsoft Access have been deprecated, and I bet you didn't know that you had half of those tools.
I mean, I learned graphics design on Macromedia Fireworks. Can I use that now? no. It was the industry standard for raster graphics that were not digital photos- but it's dead now.
Even staying with Excel: Excel on Windows and Excel on MacOS are similar, but not the same. Many features available on the Windows version are simply unavailable on MacOS.
Where-as something like Libreoffice Calc works consistently across platforms.
So, yeah, learning Excel only means that you're Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office for your entire professional career.
Which is great for microsoft, because you will always take the pain of learning whatever they do over migrating to something else, due to the cost of retraining to more conventional standards.
Germany has struggled with digitization, sometimes it feels like you're walking back into the 70s when you're dealing with it. That is in part because of their traditional views (which can be good and bad) which aren't always in tune with how the rest of the global economy has already played out. I feel like every year I read about some Germany state or city upending their previous system to go to Open Source, then 2-3 years later see it walked back.
Appeals to continuance (perhaps because you have a personal sunk cost fallacy?) are unconvincing.
Your original assertion (that FOSS programs might go away) is a weak one for the reasons stated.
"Getting a job" is subjective, that depends on what skills are in-demand. I don't see many people putting "Skilled at Microsoft Viva" on their CV, and that's not because it's proprietary. It's because desired skills are borne from need, and there are network effects in those.
If nobody had adopted Excel and instead learned R and SQL, then you would be getting jobs based on listing them as skills. Not surprisingly.
EDIT: I should point out that businesses usually follow what schools do: the reason Java is so popular in Germany is because it's what University used to teach so it is (or was) a common denominator, Microsoft knew this and poured billions into getting Microsoft into Education in the 90s when I was coming up. That doesn't mean they get a perpetual license to continue in the event they abuse that position, which they do.
From an outsider's perspective it's not only Germany but much of Europe is suffering from the same problem. The EU is such an all-pervasive force in Europe that one wonders why EU objectives haven't been set to rectify this. Why is this so?
I'll explain what I mean by example: if the EU would provide incentives to businesses, governments and schools to use say LibreOffice as well as finding a means to subsidize LibO's development including its potential developers then it would not take that long before LibO would not only be up to speed with O365 but potentially even better than it—in an environment nurtured by the EU, LibO could have thousands of developers.
Here's another example: there has never been a proper and comprehensive WYSIWYG HTML editor that's both open source and free. The closest we've gotten to that is BlueGriffon but one has to pay to get it to work properly. Even then, it's late on updates not to mention short on features and it uses quirky procedures and nomenclature. It is a primary candidate for such treatment by the EU. …And there are many more examples like these.
An EU-wide perspective would set the agenda for determining what are the most relevant/important aspects of programs to develop first, and so on. Moreover, both LibO and BlueGriffon are European based which ought to aid matters considerably.
I find it truly perplexing that the EU hasn't put a high priority on (a) developing a more robust software industry and (b) ridding itself of its dependence on US-based software.
If Europe had a stronger software industry then there'd be much less problem with the GDPR, using European software would ensure that user data would remain on servers located within Europe.
This ought to be a no-brainer, so why isn't it?
Apart from Excel specialists with highly specialized workflows when the rest of your finance department is also using the same, nobody cares whether you're good at Excel. They just want something to easily tabulate rows and columns of data and get some insight of out if. LibreOffice does that as much as Google and MS.
Don't put "LibreOffice" on your resume, put "spreadsheets" and 95% of the time it won't make an actual difference anyway. You can learn the location/naming of most relevant functions of your employer's preferred spreadsheet app in a matter of hours and then you know several tools, which is always better than just knowing a single one and puts you ahead in other ways.
Excel is just a spreadsheet program. It's hardly unique; there's one in LibreOffice. They all descend from VisiCalc.
The idea of a spreadsheet was a revolutionary invention (Dan Bricklin); I believe he failed to patent it. As far as I can see, Excel was just a GUI rewrite of Multiplan, which was supposed to be Microsoft's Lotus-123 killer.
> The whole point of schooling is to build real world skills.
That's called training, not schooling.
What german schools need is technically competent people who are able to teach their students actually relevant information. The problem is that it is quite hard to find people who are technically competent and able/willing to teach. (This is somewhat of a structural problem, due to how the teaching profession is set up.)
The best part of my IT school education (in Germany) was when my school hired a professional software developer who taught programming for a semester. The worst part about it was that half the class clearly didn't care.
I had the benefit of being taught how to use spreadsheets. Not Excel. Not even 1-2-3. I also had the benefit of being taught how to use word processors. Not Word. Not even WordPerfect. The teacher understood that transferable skills had to be taught since they knew the product we were learning with would never be used in the workplace.
My mother was taking similar courses around the same time, only they were geared towards the workplace. She was provided with three books over an inch thick that walked the students through a particular product. One set of books for Word, then another set of books for WordPerfect. These courses didn't treat skills as transferable, and I'm sure a lot of students suffered because of that approach since I have seen many people freeze up or complain when presented with a product they weren't taught.
Exactly. The big problem with the current status quo is that kids are being taught that SaaS is how everything should work. You log in to your apps, save your data in “the cloud”, and pay forever. By the time they finish school many don’t even know how to use a local file system.
Commercial software has a higher risk of becoming unavailable, because of missing licenses, acquisitions, insolvencies and other things that simply do not affect FOSS.
I have been using Audacity, Gimp, OpenOffice / LibreOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox for many years now and I don't see them disappearing anytime soon.
> I think the constant flux and reluctance to just move on is holding them back.
The reasons are not FOSS or privacy, but underinvestment and incompetence.