Comment by redeeman
8 hours ago
because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."
This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites.
Organizations choose Office because it:
1. enables interoperability with other organizations
2. has a commercial throat to choke
3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
curious that item zero is missing.. for specific example, long ago.. Brazil was in the middle about modernizing using desktop computers, language translations, support, and a large dose of polarization about depending on American products. So many kinds of Office software were being tested, including of course the MSFT products. This story is from the late 90s.
One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.
Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.
I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.
As if it is somehow MSFT's fault that others failed to do the same?
"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.
Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.
> "so that I may never realize I use something else"
The main reasons are:
1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)
2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)