Comment by lukan
1 day ago
"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this."
Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools?
So yes, one can (and should) build them. But the market right now is not offering this yet.
Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts.
If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365.
This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
> But that's letting them set the goalposts.
This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there.
You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU.
Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even trying is just preseving the status quo.
Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine. Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on the windows machine of the sender. I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or something like that. But that's like just for developers suffering. Most govt offices or universities just work on individual files and that will never suffer even one bit
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The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff.
The second best time is now.
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://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...
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.
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It is way more ridiculous to ask USA to protect you from Russia when you are funding the Russian military with your oil purchases.
"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. "
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).
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!
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?
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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.
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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.
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?
For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors.
The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again
Its not the basic mail and calendar functionality that drives large business to Microsoft (and to a lesser degree Google). It's really not anything that a normal user would see in an average role.
Email in a large organization requires things like central management, compliance with retention policies and other regulations, data loss prevention, encryption standards, auditing and ediscovery capabilities, etc.
Yes and they keep blocking features in Firefox on Linux. When I change the user agent to match edge on windows things suddenly work fine.
When it's set to Firefox attachment uploads don't work and ever morning it jumps to "please wait while we're signing you out..." when i never asked for that. When it thinks it's edge it just stays signed in.
Not to mention the huge amount of telemetry I need to block with ublock origin.
You don't want a drop-in replacement for each service, you want one for the entire system.
Microsofts advantage is ActiveDirectory integration. Centrally managed users and machines, every user, every application, every service authentications through the AD.
Organizations opt for Teams all the time, because it's part of the package and fully integrated. There's no reason they couldn't pick something else, but why deal with it when Teams just work (sort of).
And OpenDesk has managed to do without, they seem to be using Univention Nubus as an AD Replacement
https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-microsoft...
Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace AD integration with self management?
OAuth enabled systems aren’t enough, central management of users and machines are huge. If that core matures, it opens up the market for replacements in other areas. Teams, Outlook and the Office Suite need first grade replacements.
There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above.
The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers.
And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.
Exactly this. A while back, a greybeard told me "CVS never flew anyone to the Bahamas for a few rounds of bikini golf", when I was complaining about my employer picking the version control system and torture device "Serena Dimensions".
Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about.
They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office.
Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia.
So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?
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> The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt.
I think this is a little superficial. There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well. Of course anything is possible given enough time and money. The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.
>There will be mountains of existing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents that would need converting, as well as configured permissions structures and remotely managed laptop configurations that currently are working well
Well, they are not working well right now, because they could be rendered inoperable at any moment through Microsoft flipping a switch. That risk is real and has precedent (ICC having their Outlook access revoked).
>The real issue isn't to do with your ageism. It's whether that time and money is best spent on this particular area.
When European sovereignty is on the line, it's never too expensive.
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There's not even a reasonable FOSS calendar for Linux that integrates with email. Thunderbird has it, but it doesn't work with Google's Advanced Protection for instance.
Evolution has worked with every corporate environment I’ve been in since 2003. Mail, calendar, contacts, tasks has always worked great, including companies that have used outlook, Google, and others.
I personally don’t love thunderbird, but what is it missing?
Gnome through their online accounts supports most major corporate providers which has calendars showing up in evolution, the dedicated calendar app, and in the status bar of gnome shell.
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> Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint)
Same with SharePoint here. I've never seen it not turn into a steaming pile of shit within months of deployment where nobody can find anything.
The way teams and yammer auto create groups left right and center in it doesn't help. And its search function is less than useless.
This is in fact the main thing I use copilot for, to find stuff in that mess.
Have you worked in government services and know what their needs are?
I did not, but as far as I know, they require a bit more more than some office solution, shared drive and some email client.
(How do you imagine how it works internally if you apply for a new passport, they just send some office documents via email around?)
I have worked in (German) Government, and apart from complacency (and maybe corruption, see Limux) there's nothing stopping the German government (at least at federal level) from adopting open source.
If processes depend on some crappy excel table (created by somebody 20 years ago) or even worse, sharepoint app (commissioned by people who shouldn't be deciding things like this), the processes suck and need to be rebuilt anyhow.
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In what way do they need Microsoft Software or Technology except maybe Windows for their Passport Application?
That's special software developed for one customer only anyways. So it's perfectly possible to target another Platform or do this as some kind of WebApp.
And until then run some Windows Desktops for those special applications/services
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Okay... and what about Intune? (Device management)
Entra? (User management and policy)
Office 365 Exchange?
Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)
Teams?
Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?
>Intune
Fleet
>Entra? (User management and policy)
LDAP
>Office 365 Exchange?
Dovecot, Postfix
>Excel? (Finance runs on custom Excel macros and sheets)
Libreoffice calc, R and Python were needed. And if that doesn't work, finance needs to work around the vendor lockin
>Teams?
Matrix, Jitsi, Bigbluebutton, Mattermost
>Office 365 in general, security, DLP, MFA?
Authentik, Keycloak for MFA/security, OpenZFS with Nextcloud/Opencloud for DLP
It's possible, though of course less integrated and more work involved than just selling your soul to MS. But I am sure that time will also solve that, now that people are more interested in open source.
> [...] anymore after Trump.
We shouldn't have waited until Trump, we had clear signs of distrust when the Americans were spying on Angela Merkel and other European officials [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
Agreed. But Trump is the absolute last straw, and it seems some people needed that earthquake to finally wake up in the EU.