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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2].

Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.

It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736

[2] https://github.com/suitenumerique

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...

What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!

Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only.

That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).

"Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting"

If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence

"So yes, one can (and should) build them. "

Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.

It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created documents that are key to the business in one way or another (proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and Project to consider.

So then act now, because the best time to act was yesterday, and the longer you wait the worse the mess and pain becomes. Not acting at all is not an option.

Not sure if you've worked in an office recently, but on google workspace I (we) use very regularly:

- Group Editing - this ones hard to get right - Reviewing Tools - Automated document generation - Embedding of data-backed images from 3rd party tools

Looking at my wife who works in government, they use it even more heavily, with a lot of complicated formatting, numbering, standards etc going into each document, plus OneDrive collaborative features on top of that.

I suspect office-user people are where most of the features get used. Agreed, most people only use 15% of the features, but which 15% that is likely changes quickly person to person.

It is way more ridiculous to ask USA to protect you from Russia when you are funding the Russian military with your oil purchases.

The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.

I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.

Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.

Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?

Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.

Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done my share of forecasting for investors and am quite confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute worst case, just use SQL.

The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.

IME what it means is that they have a bunch of processes built that specifically depend on it. It doesn't make it impossible to switch but depending on the scope could be financially or practically prohibitive to migrate. Maybe someone has 10 years of custom excel macros put together that are run every quarter, that would need to be migrated. To migrate you might not have the internal capacity and might need to hire external help to do it.

The requirement came from the investment house - they wanted data in the format they were accustomed to.

What was driving that requirement at the investment house doesn't matter, when the company that owns over 50% of your company wants something, you don't say "Hey, we don't want to buy a Windows license with your money, how about I send it to you in this similar, but different format and then you guys can figure out how to make it match what you're looking for?"

For a power user, There is nothing even remotely comparable to Excel that exists today.

Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15 ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for 20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15 characters in the edit window and this was I was able to get the data in the cell.

Excel has gone downhill massively.

Can you name a single product that is comparable?

If it doesn't have something equivalent to Pivot Tables, it's not even worth talking about.

After using both extensively, there is no comparison between Google and the MS suite. Google’s apps are like a toy version of MS Office.

The Microsoft ones feel broken, buggy, and bloated with decades of crap. I guess there are some people using those weird edge features, but if you don’t, the Google stuff works way better.

They're competitive but they're not drop-in replacements. Even office for Mac is not a drop-in replacement for office on Windows. It's pretty trivial to find significant differences that will be in use in any large organization.

Considering every job I’ve had in recent times has involved a switch between Google/Microsoft tools after being acquired, it’s about as drop in as anything gets in tech.

Of course no product will be an identical replica of the Microsoft tools, but both get the job done.

It depends. If you're writing documents and sending email, it probably not gonna be too tough. If you've got 100,000+ lines of Excel macros, you're gonna need a pretty significant migration.

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