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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

People usually need one major thing out of their Office software: the ability to open and save Office documents from other people. LibreOffice is not there, nor will it ever be, because at the end of the day, it's the user's risk to use a non first party software.

It's not about the actual capabilities of the software, it's about getting along with other humans. And the power dynamics of that.

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Now, to be fair, first-party MS Office also has this problem. The online versions can't handle absolutely everything that the desktop applications generate (although they do better than Libreoffice), and even compatibility between, say, Office 95 and modern MS Office is not 100%. I believe MS Office is architecturally incapable of complete compatibility, since its file format is basically a binary dump tied to the current version.

One of the many reasons why my particular industry has standardized on TeX/LaTeX/PDF is because it gets along much better with other humans in terms of file format compatibility over the time scale of decades.

Indeed they do. It's a farce that schools, governments use MS Office and treat the document formats as a standard, because they are too volatile to work like that. But alas, here we are. The phenomenon I describe exist and it doesn't just exist, Microsoft made it happen consciously. Windows as the de-facto standard application platform for the PC is another such achievement of theirs. Is not perfect as well, is similarly entrenched.

For what it's worth, I use LibreOffice and I even conduct my business with open source tools, as much as I can. Usually I get away with it, and for the rest, there's a Windows VM ready to go.

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