I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi.
Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
Its an old classic using an election to kill off or stall projects in ministries or public institutions. I bet some bureaucrat or Statens It doesn't want the trouble of this moving along.
I also love the idea of ditching Microsoft and I have done so for my personal life, but if your work day lives and breathes documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks, there really is no better option out there than Microsoft Office.
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
The main reason there's nothing better is just that everyone is using ms office.
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
Don’t forget that a lot of people and organizations are using the Google suite and I think it’s almost as good, possibly better in terms of performance and responsiveness.
But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
> But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
>I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.
>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
yet another proprietary format?
And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.
I don't want the government changing or rewriting our 30-year-old archived documents. But I do want them to still be able to view them as they were originally.
Should even be possible to have an AI operate the computer, screen record the application and build a document that looks identical. Build them on demand with a cache.
I work in the public sector in Denmark. Office 365 is the bane of my work day. I only have access to the web versions of the apps, but they feel like toys. It seems impossible to do anything even moderately complex with them. Especially form design. I've installed Linux+LibreOffice on a spare machine at work that I use occasionally, to keep from tearing my hair out.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare.
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
MIT encourages future commerical capture. I can download your MIT source and go make a company and a million dollars, and you don't get shit. GPL is what you want if you don't want commercial entities to be able to use your code and then run off and make a ton of money and never have to release the source code.
I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.
AI agents can make quick work of a task like this and build out a bespoke script to get it done. However, at that point you’ve shifted a 365 subscription cost to a Claude subscription cost (and you also get Copilot usage with either of the 365 plans anyway).
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
> Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.
> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.
Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.
And what has Y done to solve it? X is capable of putting up a fight against whatever Y does, but Y claims to be powerless against X. On face value this appears to show that Y is incompetent, making X the better option.
Have you tried [0]? It can source values from CSV file and after configuring a label and sheet template you should be able to use it to print filled labels. They
They're quite usable, certainly beating MS Works at this time. They're also arguably better code somehow (e.g. startup time is very low, and unlike in MS Office I've never seen the UI lock up on a big document)
Please can you take the time to elaborate. The comment as you have left it doesn't add much without explanation. There is more and more of this on hacker news.
In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
Have you tried opening a big excel file in it? It's actually more pleasant than doing so in Excel (because it's a lot faster than Excel, even on very fast systems. And just that makes it great for financial applications, you know, abusing Excel as a database)
THIS should be the top comment. So much of our value comes from those bespoke VBA bowls of spaghetti code that get shit done perfectly the same way for the past 20 years that keep the business going. Even the big banks are like this. Someone else said “load bearing excel sheet” that’s pretty good.
I decided to build an OSS excel-like app for fun in Rust. Thought I'd hit a wall and hate it. Ended up with GPUI based 240fps app that's way faster than Numbers on my Mac. It's not feature complete, but every feature I need (graphs, 95% formula coverage, fast). Hard to imagine a world where folks pay a ton for desktop software in the future.
My mom still uses OpenOffice at her job (municipality), and honestly they haven't really felt a huge difference, they still get their work done like before, but heck there were some training to do as they were switching. I suspect at this point they would need the same training just to get back to word etc.
That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years, and has had known unaddressed security vulnerabilities for... what is it now, a year? Two years?
That is a dead project. Please Tell your mom to tell her bosses they really should switch to LibreOffice. Which is simply the continued development of the same thing. The municipality can write the Document Foundation and ask for assistance:
Most of the govt stuff is paperwork moved to "digital" paperwork using office. I sincerely hope to see a post with a title "X govt drops using any office program at all". Most of these stuff can be just CRUD apps on approval workflows with built-in digital signatures. Govt officers would not need more than browsers for majority of these daily tasks.
I guess you mean that now people make forms or documents then wither email them or they print sign and scan and send the same. Instead they could have some ERM system that supports the same functionality by just filling forms in the web ui, clicking approve buttons etc. Problem is those won't support the exact thing they need and a docx is editable to say just what you need (getting the erm provider to add a new checkbox is expensive and needs ongoing maintenance subscriptions), and often wet ink signatures are required by law.
Mostly yes. Digital signatures are better than wet signatures in almost every aspects. I've lived in Turkey, where the e-signatures are mostly limited to govt institutions, and Estonia, where the e-signatures are everywhere for everyone. Maybe moving to the digital certificates are a prerequisite of independence from Office tools.
It’s hard to parse the complaints in these transitions. Sometimes there has to be a change in process, sure, or even some genuine incompatibility. But a huge percent is social.
About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.
I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.
in my experience there might be a few people for whom "the icons are different, i need a training course" is a legitimate concern. but for the vast majority of workers, it's not "i need a training course" it's "i feel like i can get away with demanding a training course" with the full knowledge that asking for a training course will derail the effort to make a change.
That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."
Have you seen CraftApps [0]? They are "clean room" implementations of MS Word (WordCraft), MS Excel (GridCraft) and MS PowerPoint (DeckCraft), among others.
"Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall." Cory Doctorow
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
"...the Eurostack’s proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It’s not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation’s GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they’re crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America’s widely exported IP laws.
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called “adversarial interoperability.” Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing’s manufacturer"
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26...
It's the rise of local tech. If I migrate off Amazon, where do I migrate to? My house is an acceptable answer for some, but also my local ISP has a colo. Unfortunately then you have to manage that, and have a person, and soon, you've reinvented the cloud, just on your terms. Which isn't a bad thing, but that's what involved.
I don't get this. Of all the software suites out there, MS Office must be the easiest to replace. LibreOffice does everything needed, and its free. It's a no brainer.
I get where these places are coming from - it is really easy to get started implementing these workflows in Excel and just grow it from there. But they are really fragile and hard to audit - who knows whether they work correctly even now! And it's highly likely that only very few people actually understand how they work and how to maintain and extend them. Great for job security, but there is going to be a lot of problems when the people who know them are not available anymore. Better to transition the embedded knowledge to something more maintainable as long as it's still possible.
I interviewed at a job with quite a lot of maths to do. I never worked in that industry, but I made a good profolio using Jupyter notebooks so I got an interview. Turns out everything was done in Excel, they asked me a few times how good I was with Excel. It seems they are not impressed with an answer of “Yea, that’s easy, I do my personal budgeting with it”
Excel is amazing. It is Turing complete and you can make literal games inside it. There are Excel mastery competitions/world chanpionships and you should check it out to understand what experts at Excel are capable of and why your answer did not impress. True Excel mastery is a totally different thing than fluency in Word/Powerpoint.
All these non US governments have a lot of money in total.
There is also LibreOffice.
Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?
These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many
human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code
to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.
Europe really can’t even do something as simple as replacing office with all the good options available, but we are pretending they are going to replace Starlink, SpaceX, Anthropic/OpenAI and Tesla…
It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.
In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.
You say "all the good options available", but the truth is that there aren't any. Clearly LibreOffice is not a good option for them, for some reason which you are unaware of.
If there is a will there's a way. LibreOffice can have any feature ypu want if you're willing to pay for it. If you're not willing to pay then it wasn't that important to begin with.
Moving to LibreOffice cannot be a money-saving exercise if it's going to work. It has to be a political priority.
I agree that Europe as a collective is lagging behind. But, without the EU it would be much worse. Imagine having to deal with each members’ bureaucracy with rules that might contradict each other. That’s where we were. For trade and collaboration within the EU this is preferable. Even for countries outside this is beneficial: you only need to consider one set of regulations and tariffs.
While writing this, the thought occurs that having a single authority and regulator puts little checks on the amount of regulation. Whereas multiple competing countries could limit it to not have their own industries at a disadvantage. The EU, of course, has this in relation to China, US, etc., so I don’t know…
China has been successful (I guess?) in switching to WPS for civil servants and state-owned companies employees. As long as you don't have to worry about 100% compatibility with MS Office, you have a lot of options. But if you are working with others using MS Office, you will get things like font issues in Word and Powerpoint, and financial models in Excel is just hopeless.
122 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 11.7 ms ] threadThat says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi. Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
Does this work?
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
There is no technical reason to be impossible, the issue is political.
Corruption promoted by American lobbies onto European government and preventing any actual decision.
When people in charge “have balls”, it does work.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
1: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
https://www.onlyoffice.com XLSX, XLS, ODS, CSV, TXT
https://www.libreoffice.org ods, ots, fods, xlsx, xlsm, xls, xlt, xml, csv, dif, dbf, slk
But I'm much to impressed by Modern CSV
https://www.moderncsv.com CSV, JSON, XML
I like CSV for not trying to be an incompetent version of SQL
But now with AI I guess you could just ask it to debug the issue and it would decompile Word in 5 minutes and pull out the fix.
Not sure what the frustrations with typography were, but I recon they're a lot easier to fix now.
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
In many ways, recent LLM stuff is just the same process as how Excel took over the world.
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.
>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
yet another proprietary format?
And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare.
https://bounties.fulu.org/
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.
> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.
Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.
[0] https://glabels.org/
It's happening, although it's just the beginning
https://github.com/scosman/freecell
But this collision seems inauspicious.
The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.
Any day now.
That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years, and has had known unaddressed security vulnerabilities for... what is it now, a year? Two years?
That is a dead project. Please Tell your mom to tell her bosses they really should switch to LibreOffice. Which is simply the continued development of the same thing. The municipality can write the Document Foundation and ask for assistance:
https://thedocumentfoundation.org/
and there are of course commercial companies which do LO transitions too.
The last OpenOffice release was 10 days ago. Not 12 years.
https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html
About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.
I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.
in my experience there might be a few people for whom "the icons are different, i need a training course" is a legitimate concern. but for the vast majority of workers, it's not "i need a training course" it's "i feel like i can get away with demanding a training course" with the full knowledge that asking for a training course will derail the effort to make a change.
[0] https://getartcraft.com/apps
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called “adversarial interoperability.” Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing’s manufacturer" https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26...
It's getting pretty close to a reality that cloud services are vulnerable regardless of tech. They might have to abandon all cloud hopes.
Ultimately, AI will allow that. Going the other direction, AI will multiply the vendor lickin effect 100x.
So which way you going?
But people aren't looking for AWS, they're looking for Office 365.
Possibly some of the newer technologies (to avoid the first and third vowels in the Roman Alphabet) will one day bring liberty.
There is also LibreOffice.
Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?
These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.
Are there lobbyists blocking this?
Also wonder if this is eg MS offering a good deal at the eleventh hour to stop it going ahead, or if they called their bluff
It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.
In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.
Moving to LibreOffice cannot be a money-saving exercise if it's going to work. It has to be a political priority.
While writing this, the thought occurs that having a single authority and regulator puts little checks on the amount of regulation. Whereas multiple competing countries could limit it to not have their own industries at a disadvantage. The EU, of course, has this in relation to China, US, etc., so I don’t know…
I have a feeling that those threats to move away from MS Office just a way to negotiate a better price.