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Comment by HeavyStorm | Hacker News Reader

While I work for msft, I'm all for open source, even more in this space - consumer and office apps - however, my government has tried this and rolled it back a while later in some branches, while others just suffer with it.

Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see the reverse news a few years later.

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> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching.

I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoying to use. I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign. So hopefully the investment (ensuring additional developers, UI/UX people, etc) increases as they use more free software,

The more people use free software, the more it will become cost effective to improve it using government funding.

There can be enormous net savings (zero license fees), which is fantastic for the taxpayer.

Without an actual design vision, all open source software will flounder and never replace commercial counterparts.

Gimp, blender, firefox and obs are all very successful OSS alternatives that come to mind.

Gimp is a classic example of OPs point.

Mozilla really ? Lack of vision and focus driving Firefox into irrelevance. And also started on the back of a commercial product.

Blender started as a commercial software and is being spearheaded by Ton ever since (my very uninformed impression), which again reinforces OPs point.

Yeah, gimp is pretty crap and it is what it is sure. Clearly they work in a world that has more smaller boutiques where replacing Adobe with supporting OSS alternatives isn't a clear winner. Industries that have a ton of engineers are more likely to build their own alternatives, and some of them realize that they can cost share by being OSS.

Gimp is fine for my purposes, whipping up a favicon or making a bit of random developer art as filler until an actual artist can do the job.

Oh, yes, gimp, the software that is still going "we'll have non-destructive editing.. maybe.. soon.. probably" when its first elements were introduced in Photoshop in the mid 90s. The. Mid. 90s.

It's such a productivity boost that it would be a lack of self respect to one's own time to use a tool that doesn't have it.

You really gimped your argument by including it; otherwise I'd agree it can be done.

Krita would have been a much better example I think. They've had some reasonably successful crowdfunding campaigns and ongoing monthly income, with focused visions of the product they create, and they've proven capable of attracting actual users who are in it for the art instead of just your "FOSS"-radical Stallman types.

Blender represents an outlier in the OSS landscape, largely due to its unique product vision. Its development was driven by practical use in creating open movies, which provided a built-in customer base. As a niche 3D software, it was subject to less conventional expectations in its presentation, allowing it to stand out. Despite this, Blender’s UI/UX design has faced criticism, suggesting that if it were applied in other domains, the reception might be even less favorable.

Yeah I think that's exactly the point. Libre office would need a Blender like visionary management to flourish.

Their point was that it's impossible for OSS to have visionary management, the projects I listed prove that's a false claim.

Right gimp mightn't be as good as photoshop, but it's always satisfied my needs, granted my needs are pretty limited when it comes to photo editing/art.

I'm not claiming OSS projects are inherently better or even equal to their commercial closed source alternatives. I just think the claim that an OSS project haven't have vision is rubbish.

What a ridiculous thing to say

> I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign

Makes sense in principle, but practically speaking Germany would seem to have higher priority threats to address than software from the United States?

Mhm. Spending less on licenses would free up money for other things.

Countries are big. They can do more than one thing at a time.

The Document Foundation is a German organization.

>Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

For a fraction of the money spent on these sorts of enterprise contracts you could hire dozens of full-time developers to improve LibreOffice. Clearly something easily within the capacity of the EU, if they were capable of good strategic decisions.

When the reverse happens, it generally doesn't make the news.

Does libreoffice do hotkeys similar to excel/powerpoint?

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives

Bullshit. The only reason to use Microsoft Office is compatibility with Microsoft Office files. What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word? Nothing. There are some new bugs that didn't exist before, but no advancements. That's what lack of competition gives you.

Objectively there have been an absolutely enormous number of "improvements" to MS office (including Outlook and Word) over the last decade. The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities. See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/sto... .

Interestingly, there is a decreased emphasis on the file format- the opposite of your point. In addition to cloudy used on mobile devices, sharepoint, etc; since 2007 or so Word has used docx, which has better cross compatibility with other suites, even Google Docs: https://www.howtogeek.com/304622/what-is-a-.docx-file-and-ho... .

My personal use patterns- I use LibreOffice quite a bit, Google Docs rarely, and MS Office daily for work. Outlook and Word have changed a lot and continue to evolve (watch for copilot integrations).

Enormous number of improvements? That link shows barely any improvements. If there was healthy competition you'd actually see enormous number of improvements.

> The biggest is probably cloud/simultaneous editing capabilities.

That was in response to Google Docs and is more than 10 years old (added in 2013?).

The bar for Outlook was so abysmally low- and even today it is pretty much the IE6 of mail clients. But good news! With the New Outlook, it won't even be a mail client at all.

This depends on what parts you use. For many Microsoft Word 4 was probably peak Word. At this point Office is becoming an OS into itself.

Exactly. Especially for contract negotiations & track changes with a counterparty. Only MS can figure out their screwed up document formats. Office is terrible these days, it is so damned slow. I remember Office 97, so fast and responsive on a Pentium 90, now back in the dark ages of slow bloatware and network latency. It takes so long to open a document, I forget what I was doing the week I double clicked on the file.

> What improvements have been made in the last 10 years in Outlook and Word?

Microsoft Search makes it much easier to find stuff. Word got near real-time co-editing (or perhaps that was closer to 11 years ago) and later (<10 years ago) got real-time co-editing. Which is such a huge game changer for users with complex documents that GDocs falls down on.

Lots of other improvements in Excel and PowerPoint, data access/visualization, various presenter modes, and then you've got that AI stuff all mixed in.

Microsoft Search? Where is that exactly? Search is the biggest weak point of Microsoft products. Try finding anything in Teams. Now try the Search box at the bottom of Hacker News. See the difference?

Microsoft's revenue from Office was $211B in 2023. That's almost a quarter of a TRILLION dollars in annual revenue. And for that you got what? A presenter mode and data access? Imagine if that revenue was split between three equally strong competitors. That would have spurred innovation.

If you're unaware of what features/functionality are part of the M365 suite, why are you commenting that it is stagnant?

It seems like you're discussing a subject you're objectively unfamiliar with. And no, of course the couple things I mentioned aren't all that's happened in the M365/M365 Apps space. They're what came to top of mind. It doesn't mean they're the biggest or best features.

I use Teams every day and I know exactly how much its search sucks. I am very familiar with how Microsoft doesn't innovate, does not have a history of innovation, and only copies competitors' successful products and features. Unless you were born yesterday you should too.

In Word and Outlook not so much (and the “new Outlook” is much worse), but there have been substantial improvements in Excel.

While I'll agree the "eye candy updates" may not be there (apart from marketing-driven AI additions and visual updates), there are some big features that aren't visible until you enter the enterprise space. For example, Purview Information Protection [1] and Data Classification integration [2] make data protection, audits/compliance a no-brainer, and are _extremely_ compelling arguments for an integrated suite at the CISO level.

(The downside of course is this is a single-source stack, which can be a risk in of itself)

I have no real background in Libre (apart from using it, which I enjoy), but from cursory searches, there doesn't appear to be equivalent features available (very happy to be wrong here FWIW). Are there alternatives in this space?

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/information-protec... [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/data-classificatio...

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