Technology

Frankly, I never understood why businesses were invested in the office suite anyway.

When MS Office really took off back in the Office 97 days there weren't any good alternatives and now MS Office is so embedded that it's almost impossible to dislodge.

Frankly, I never understood why businesses were invested in the office suite anyway.

Then you've never worked in an environment of many people, where nothing compares to office, and you can be confident the file you send will look the same on the other end. This is crucial.

Considering there are so many good open source alternatives.

Oh really? Let me see some tables in Open Office Calc. Oh, yea, the devs flat out said they will not support tables in Calc because it's "bad practice", and you should use a database app instead.

Sorry, it takes me seconds to setup a table in Excel, and I can do all kinds of sorting, filtering, etc with trivial effort. I'm not setting up a DB everytime I need to ad-hoc sort/filter 20 rows. There are constant annoyances like this with these open source office apps. Counterintuitive ways of doing things (or not being able to do things at all).

Nothing out there compares to Office. Considering the licensing costs for enterprise (where you can have 50,000+ users), if they could eliminate that cost without incurring massive productivity losses, don't you think they would?

Plus you have millions (if not billions) of docs, templates, processes (where automation exports their data into Office apps e.g. Word or Excel), for users or business management to use, perhaps in other apps or systems. Whose going to pay to reproduce all that work in another system?

Plus historically, Office 4 (in about 1997) had tight integration - nothing else came anywhere close. And that's been the case ever since. I know when I copy data from any office app that it will properly support OLE - OneNote will embed an excel sheet (or publisher/word doc) just fine. Try that with Calc, and you get some weird behaviour.

I'm glad to see the competition, but it's got a long way to go to make inroads against office.

I understand completely. It’s what people are used to and tech illiterate people don’t want to learn “we actually use a different software here”. These are people who already struggle with excel.

Personally if I were to start a business I’d use open source where practical, but I’d be struggling there because it’d be an engineering company and neither autocad nor solidworks is available on linux. It would be a decision on par with and probably in conflict with my commitment to running any such company as a co-op.

And this is kinda where we run into the problem, Microsoft won. The anti trust it needed to lose was it being able to demand to be the only option as a pre installed OS decades ago.

Because a paid program must be better than something a buch of hobos cobbled together for free!