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The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

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Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#91

Post by kaliszad »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #88
impossiblefork wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written…

>My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago. Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit. And non-te…

Arguably, most people I have encountered don't actually know how to use Microsoft Office in any kind of depth but it is a familiar environment for them. It is like most people don't actually drive a car well as supported by car accident statistics. Most work probably shouldn't be done in the Office suite but rather some information system copying the formalized process. Most text processing should probably decouple content from form a lot more and there certainly are people that do just that but it is not the norm.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#92

Post by javcasas »

oezi wrote: post #73
fulafel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost. People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's a…

People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing. As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.

You don't hate teams. I hate teams. Because it's ultra-slow and bloated, and used to eat 1.5 CPU cores all the time until I threw it permanently on a browser window. And now it doesn't notify me when other people send me a message.

Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#93

Post by Kwpolska »

akdor1154 wrote: post #68
Kwpolska wrote: post #29

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.

> there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.

I tested this with LibreOffice 24.2.1.2, and it’s far, far from what Excel tables do. The most basic features of an Excel table (Insert -> Table) are (a) the ability to reference cells in the same row by the name of the column, (b) displaying table headers in the chrome when scrolling, (c) auto-completing formulae until the end of the table, (d) pretty formatting, (e) auto-filtering configured by default. I can’t see any of those with the ranges in LO.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#94

Post by Kwpolska »

bj-rn wrote: post #61
Kwpolska wrote: post #29

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.

There is SoftMaker Office from Germany. Never used it though. https://www.softmaker.com/en https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office

I tested the free version, their Excel equivalent seems fine, although with some strange limitations in the free version (you can edit Tables in Excel documents, but not create new ones, as creating is a paid feature).

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#95

Post by eric-burel »

roenxi wrote: post #2

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…

I am mesmerized at how much the comments analyze Europe under the perspective of the United States, eg we need a Silicon Valley otherwise we don't exist from a technological standpoint, we should become an homogeneous market etc. We are not the USA and I feel fine with it, we are still able to figure the most advanced technologies on our own

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#96

Post by moooo99 »

the_cramer wrote: post #32
moooo99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This is worthy of some sources, no? People on HN, technology professionals, might hate office. But we're not majority and I've never seen researched/polled numbers about hating office...

I doubt that there are any reputable sources you could find that aren't shaped by bias (of MS or competitors). However, I have worked in a non-IT related job for years and about 90% of complaints about software we use would fit into one of two buckets

1.) Microsoft Office

2.) SAP

I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#97

Post by BlueTemplar »

kfk wrote: post #5

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…

Well, that, or the executive arms of the EU could stop being in denial about US infocom companies being legal in the EU.

(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#98

Post by homarp »

pjerem wrote: post #57
forty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very possible to be very rich in France. It's not the result of random luck that both the richest man and the richest woman in the world were french not that long ago (Bernard Arnaud and Liliane Bettencourt). You should not buy the right wing discourse that in France rich people are too taxed and they flee blabla. This is just a way to push their right wing agenda. I'm myself quite rich and I'm doing well, so do…

I agree with you, and French people have nothing against riches as long as they don’t try to evade taxation. We have plenty of rich people who just contribute to the social system and live their life. What French people don’t like is when elites try to steal our social system. However your example isn’t really fair to be honest : Arnault and Bettencourt are really not self-made families, they are both from historical…

But Niel is a good example on how you can get rich in France.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#99

Post by TiredOfLife »

wazoox wrote: post #24
personomas wrote: post #18

Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other. Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!

Ever heard of Edward Snowden by any chance?

The russian spy, or another one?

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#100

Post by croes »

oriolid wrote: post #72
croes wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF. Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them. The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company. Have seen that…

> That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF. PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years. Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.

PDF is still less worse than Office documents especially if you avoid Adbobe Acrobat Reader
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