Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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Even within the very well-worn "core" products of the MS office ecosystem: huge UI design changes de-skill millions of workers.

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.

You can believe whatever you want and come up with every excuse to support your world view but putting "proficient in LibreOffice" on your resume is not going to help you get a job or help the company. "Proficient in Excel" will. The UI of Excel isn't overly important, formulation is and as I said it's cheaper to pay the O365 fee than to pay individual licensing fees, so throwing out random product names that aren't widely used isn't helping your case.

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.

Your argument is "the status quo is the status quo and therefore it should remain as such because it's the status quo".

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.

"Germany has struggled with digitization, sometimes it feels like you're walking back into the 70s when you're dealing with it."

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?

Meanwhile, my 500-person company switches from MS Office to Google Docs like it's no big deal. Because it isn't. Excel isn't the main skill, using spreadsheets is. Formulas, tabs, references, filters, sorting, pivot tables, scripting, blah blah blah.

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.

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