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What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.
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> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice). > calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager? > information is siloed to only meeting participants You can configure it to…
> People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…
> Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
Yet, here it is the top comment.
It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
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That's utter nonsense.
It's actually spot on. We are all looking pretty nervously at the possibility of Trump's return. He'd be definitely willing to throw us under the Putin bus for a couple million USD laundered through his golf club or hotel bookings. And you wouldn't actually revolt and do anything about that. So, on a whole, not really allies. Just other people who individually may or may not be our friends.
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MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
> Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish. [0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o... [1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...…
All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.
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> Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today. Yet, here it is the top comment. It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good.
So of course people will defend that.
In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.
FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.
Linux on the desktop is utopian. Even in 2024, it is plagued with millions of bugs. I can't use Linux for an hour on a desktop PC without encountering some issue. On the other hand, MacBooks and Windows PCs just work seamlessly, without any problems whatsoever. This is solely the fault of Linux developers, who, instead of developing one system well, create dozens of half-baked package managers, desktop environments,…
The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitru…
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.