Comment by walrus01

> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value

It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.

In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.