"Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall." Cory Doctorow
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
"...the Eurostack’s proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It’s not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation’s GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they’re crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America’s widely exported IP laws.
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called “adversarial interoperability.” Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing’s manufacturer"
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26...
It's the rise of local tech. If I migrate off Amazon, where do I migrate to? My house is an acceptable answer for some, but also my local ISP has a colo. Unfortunately then you have to manage that, and have a person, and soon, you've reinvented the cloud, just on your terms. Which isn't a bad thing, but that's what involved.
According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
I also love the idea of ditching Microsoft and I have done so for my personal life, but if your work day lives and breathes documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks, there really is no better option out there than Microsoft Office.
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
(I am quite aware of the controversy around the suite but I don’t think the controversy has enough meat on its bones for me to care about it, especially when I barely use these applications as it stands. I just really don’t like LibreOffice by comparison in terms of the UI and overall experience.)
Not OP, but I like OnlyOffice for its keytips support (tap alt and then the whole ribbon gives you live hints for navigating and executing UI functions/buttons with the keyboard). Far ahead of LibreOffice, at least at the moment.
The main reason there's nothing better is just that everyone is using ms office.
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.
"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.
Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.
Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.
Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.
Its an old classic using an election to kill off or stall projects in ministries or public institutions. I bet some bureaucrat or Statens It doesn't want the trouble of this moving along.
I work in the public sector in Denmark. Office 365 is the bane of my work day. I only have access to the web versions of the apps, but they feel like toys. It seems impossible to do anything even moderately complex with them. Especially form design. I've installed Linux+LibreOffice on a spare machine at work that I use occasionally, to keep from tearing my hair out.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
> But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
Should even be possible to have an AI operate the computer, screen record the application and build a document that looks identical. Build them on demand with a cache.
It’s hard to parse the complaints in these transitions. Sometimes there has to be a change in process, sure, or even some genuine incompatibility. But a huge percent is social.
About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.
I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.
in my experience there might be a few people for whom "the icons are different, i need a training course" is a legitimate concern. but for the vast majority of workers, it's not "i need a training course" it's "i feel like i can get away with demanding a training course" with the full knowledge that asking for a training course will derail the effort to make a change.
That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."
I find that people who demand or complain about training tends to be a really good filter for people that are hard to work with or intellectually incurious.
Way back in the original dot-com boom some people where I worked were concerned about how we'd provide training for our web product. The CTO shut that down with "if users need training to use our website, we've already failed."
Stick to conventions, don't reinvent the wheel, and training needs should be minimal.
Very few people who know MS Office could not pick up LibreOffice and be fine with it.
Ya, honestly fuck training. People who demand training in order to fly an airliner or operate power tools or conduct surgery are just hard to work with and intellectually incurious. They should be able to figure it out based on YouTube videos and ChatGPT prompts.
- Hey, can you please answer my questions?
- No, I merely work here.
Yeah, there are people who think that they are being paid to be at work, not to do work, to apply themselves, to engage, to provide and produce. And it sucks to work with those kinds of people.
I always go with: It is your job to answer. The extended version: If you don't like it you can search for a different job where you won't get questions from me.... but there probably will be others with similar questions or even harder ones. etc basically go on endlessly about the hypothetical them working someplace else. Next time it happens I return to the subject.
Then a coworker showed an even more sophisticated version of the same joke. He created a nearly identical relationship but he would look for job offers matching their resume and pitch them. Look, this is closer to where you live and the pay is better!
Have you seen CraftApps [0]? They are "clean room" implementations of MS Word (WordCraft), MS Excel (GridCraft) and MS PowerPoint (DeckCraft), among others.
My mom still uses OpenOffice at her job (municipality), and honestly they haven't really felt a huge difference, they still get their work done like before, but heck there were some training to do as they were switching. I suspect at this point they would need the same training just to get back to word etc.
That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years, and has had known unaddressed security vulnerabilities for... what is it now, a year? Two years?
That is a dead project. Please Tell your mom to tell her bosses they really should switch to LibreOffice. Which is simply the continued development of the same thing. The municipality can write the Document Foundation and ask for assistance:
China has been successful (I guess?) in switching to WPS for civil servants and state-owned companies employees. As long as you don't have to worry about 100% compatibility with MS Office, you have a lot of options. But if you are working with others using MS Office, you will get things like font issues in Word and Powerpoint, and financial models in Excel is just hopeless.
Most of the govt stuff is paperwork moved to "digital" paperwork using office. I sincerely hope to see a post with a title "X govt drops using any office program at all". Most of these stuff can be just CRUD apps on approval workflows with built-in digital signatures. Govt officers would not need more than browsers for majority of these daily tasks.
I guess you mean that now people make forms or documents then wither email them or they print sign and scan and send the same. Instead they could have some ERM system that supports the same functionality by just filling forms in the web ui, clicking approve buttons etc. Problem is those won't support the exact thing they need and a docx is editable to say just what you need (getting the erm provider to add a new checkbox is expensive and needs ongoing maintenance subscriptions), and often wet ink signatures are required by law.
Mostly yes. Digital signatures are better than wet signatures in almost every aspects. I've lived in Turkey, where the e-signatures are mostly limited to govt institutions, and Estonia, where the e-signatures are everywhere for everyone. Maybe moving to the digital certificates are a prerequisite of independence from Office tools.
I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
> Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.
> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.
Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.
Have you tried [0]? It can source values from CSV file and after configuring a label and sheet template you should be able to use it to print filled labels.
Can be used it with a thermal label printer and with generic label sheets if you are willing to hand tweak templates.
AI agents can make quick work of a task like this and build out a bespoke script to get it done. However, at that point you’ve shifted a 365 subscription cost to a Claude subscription cost (and you also get Copilot usage with either of the 365 plans anyway).
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
MIT encourages future commerical capture. I can download your MIT source and go make a company and a million dollars, and you don't get shit. GPL is what you want if you don't want commercial entities to be able to use your code and then run off and make a ton of money and never have to release the source code.
But the MIT source remains open, yeah? Do I care if someone tries to make money with the open code? Not really, as long as the open code generated remains open and can not be gated for economic returns. Certainly, it would be different if I would expect to try to build a business off of "source available" code.
I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.
Please can you take the time to elaborate. The comment as you have left it doesn't add much without explanation. There is more and more of this on hacker news.
Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.
I don't get this. Of all the software suites out there, MS Office must be the easiest to replace. LibreOffice does everything needed, and its free. It's a no brainer.
I get where these places are coming from - it is really easy to get started implementing these workflows in Excel and just grow it from there. But they are really fragile and hard to audit - who knows whether they work correctly even now! And it's highly likely that only very few people actually understand how they work and how to maintain and extend them. Great for job security, but there is going to be a lot of problems when the people who know them are not available anymore. Better to transition the embedded knowledge to something more maintainable as long as it's still possible.
I interviewed at a job with quite a lot of maths to do. I never worked in that industry, but I made a good profolio using Jupyter notebooks so I got an interview. Turns out everything was done in Excel, they asked me a few times how good I was with Excel. It seems they are not impressed with an answer of “Yea, that’s easy, I do my personal budgeting with it”
Europe really can’t even do something as simple as replacing office with all the good options available, but we are pretending they are going to replace Starlink, SpaceX, Anthropic/OpenAI and Tesla…
It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.
In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.
I agree that Europe as a collective is lagging behind. But, without the EU it would be much worse. Imagine having to deal with each members’ bureaucracy with rules that might contradict each other. That’s where we were. For trade and collaboration within the EU this is preferable. Even for countries outside this is beneficial: you only need to consider one set of regulations and tariffs.
While writing this, the thought occurs that having a single authority and regulator puts little checks on the amount of regulation. Whereas multiple competing countries could limit it to not have their own industries at a disadvantage. The EU, of course, has this in relation to China, US, etc., so I don’t know…
You say "all the good options available", but the truth is that there aren't any. Clearly LibreOffice is not a good option for them, for some reason which you are unaware of.
European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
100%. Most people are not programmers. Most people do not see software as something interesting to figure out. It's just a tool for them to do their job.
To get the average office worker to want to switch, you not only have to provide a finished product that works smoothly, but also one that feels familiar. Most office workers grind through their day doing repetitive tasks in familiar software they have been using for a decade. When the top of the food chain says they are overhauling the entire software suite that people have been grown accustomed to for their entire career, the new software better have real benefits that incentivise employees to actually engage with learning it. Otherwise productivity will simply crater.
Most office workers do not care to learn new software. They just want to get on with their job. For better or for worse. But if you can demonstrate a switch will make their lives easier and the UI UX of the new software is very familiar and intuitive (and it actually works) you may be able to pull off a clean switch and keep your employees happy.
An MVP is fine but I think it's crucial that the UI UX is very similar to the software that it is replacing because it means people don't have to relearn whatever habits they have developed over the years in the old stack. I think that's what creates the most resistance to change.
This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
I'd sign up for tenders, but they all seem to require a company with "1 million EUR revenue in public sector <whatever> projects" and 5 people with various roles, degrees and X years of experience in <whatever>.
I'm just a freelancer with FLOSS experience and some commercial experience, and so are plenty other FLOSS contributors. Nobody's going to create a company and hire staff just to have a chance at getting selected in the one tender a year that allows outsiders in.
The idea might be that only companies which have already proven themselves elsewhere can enter, but 1) then why the "public sector work revenue" requirement? And 2) that's not going to work for industries where government interest is much larger than private interest, like FLOSS.
But I suppose governments prefer the certainty that Accenture or local equivalents bring - a price an order of magnitude too high for a mediocre result and a 25% chance that the project will be fucked up and shelved, over the uncertainty of a small startup, who could either deliver something great, or overexert themselves and not finish at all...
I think a lot of these massive tendering companies got started by meeting tenders they didn't get. Like for Microsoft, first they added all the features that were necessary for the tenders, and only after that, they started winning tenders. That's the story of the Windows NT POSIX subsystem that nobody ever needed.
It also helps to be flexible with the truth. If you get this one million dollar tender then you'll be doing one million dollars of business with the government so you can check that box.
If you meet all checkboxes, have the lowest price and still don't get the tender, you can usually sue the government for corruption. These processes are strictly regulated to avoid that.
It should be about features and price, but those only matter after you clear the bar. At least in the Czech Republic, you can't bullshit your way through the requirements like you can with job interviews, these things are actually checked.
Also here you can't sue directly, you can file a complaint with the oversight bureau, which regularly happens just because a competitor is mad at not being selected, but that's a different problem...
Which doesn't change the fact that you need a corporate entity to be there to actually deploy and maintain the software you're pushing - and for a longer time than a few months before you get bored.
Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
> But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology
Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change
If it's AI ... the whole point this version of AI was invented was translation. That's what transformers are for. So why don't they build versions of the apps and pages in every language under the sun from Aztec to Zaparo, from Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform?
American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it difficult to compete with them.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
I don't think American big tech pays their workers that much more once you factor in tax and social security contributions of the employer, actual hours worked (vs. vacation and sick days taken) etc. etc.
Nobody was talking about sales tax.
The collusion of US big tech with Ireland to pay very little taxes is well documented. You mention many unrelated facts that are mostly irrelevant to the discussion.
Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
The situation is, in fact, quite alike to chinese state-sponsored companies. The main difference being the tone of media coverage about it in the western world.
> Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
That's not a subsidy. That's a customer paying for a product. Apart from that, the USA has Anti-Trust laws, and Microsoft has been at the receiving end of these in the past.
Sure, but if the customer is tax-funded and pays a lot more than the product is worth, that's just a hidden subsidy.
And yes Anti-Trust laws and enforcement exist in theory, and occasionally get applied, leading to small fines. Which is in line with what I wrote. Anti-Trust action has been severely lacking, and I assume that was by design.
OK so lower corporate taxes then. Easy. If that enables European tech companies to grow and prosper then this will actually increase net tax revenue even if the rates are lower.
If the European Commission actually thought Element was absolute shit, I don't think their management would have come along to The Matrix Conference last week and presented the project as a success: https://cfp.2026.matrix.org/matrix-conference-2026/talk/YHV8.... As someone else said, the quote is pure propaganda.
Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.
Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).
It starts in Wealth of Nations, was picked up by a French revolutionary (still aimed at England, but in a more negative way), and Ben Franklin said something similar about Holland.
The issue with building alternatives is always that it is quite easy to get something that can do 90% or more of the work, but the remainder takes a lot more time to pull off.
Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.
The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.
Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.
That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.
Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.
Many open-source programs have great usability. It’s just that a lot of people define “usability” as “works as closely to Microsoft equivalent as possible”, which is not really fair.
Basically all Microsoft software is bad. It’s obtuse, slow, unintuitive garbage. But people get very used to it, and are fantastic at navigating around and getting their job done. I should hope so, they’ve had decades.
If even a tenth of all government licence fees went to improve open source alternatives, they would surpass Microsoft within a year. And every human on earth would benefit.
Instead we're being extorted by Microsoft for buggy software
Good luck with MS support when things go wrong. Your ticket will bounce between 7 different engineering services which will try their basic debug script before tossing you to another department, all after calling you at 4am.
Also, MS doesn't care anymore since they have the monopoly. Things go wrong? Tough shit you won't migrate somewhere else anyway, and will continue to spend millions for licences.
I mean, the bribes have absolutely everything to do with it but so does the fact that open source alternatives more often than not fall painfully short.
So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.
I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.
It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already an engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good. If someone invested into something like this full-time for 6 months it's hard to imagine what you'd need excel for.
All these non US governments have a lot of money in total.
There is also LibreOffice.
Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?
These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many
human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code
to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.
The difficulty of implementing a replacement for MS Office was never the implementation effort. There are problems where LLMs can help, but the remaining crucial roadblocks are of organizational and political nature.
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi.
Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
THIS should be the top comment. So much of our value comes from those bespoke VBA bowls of spaghetti code that get shit done perfectly the same way for the past 20 years that keep the business going. Even the big banks are like this. Someone else said “load bearing excel sheet” that’s pretty good.
Have you tried opening a big excel file in it? It's actually more pleasant than doing so in Excel (because it's a lot faster than Excel, even on very fast systems. And just that makes it great for financial applications, you know, abusing Excel as a database)
"Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall." Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
"...the Eurostack’s proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It’s not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation’s GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they’re crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America’s widely exported IP laws.
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called “adversarial interoperability.” Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing’s manufacturer" https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26...
I just installed a browser extension that lets me have the AI drive any tab.
It's getting pretty close to a reality that cloud services are vulnerable regardless of tech. They might have to abandon all cloud hopes.
It's the rise of local tech. If I migrate off Amazon, where do I migrate to? My house is an acceptable answer for some, but also my local ISP has a colo. Unfortunately then you have to manage that, and have a person, and soon, you've reinvented the cloud, just on your terms. Which isn't a bad thing, but that's what involved.
If the problem is that you can't get cloud hosting in your area, start providing cloud hosting in your area.
But people aren't looking for AWS, they're looking for Office 365.
Right. To be resilient and independent...you need to be... resilient and independent.
Ultimately, AI will allow that. Going the other direction, AI will multiply the vendor lickin effect 100x.
So which way you going?
According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
1: https://www.collaboraonline.com/
I also love the idea of ditching Microsoft and I have done so for my personal life, but if your work day lives and breathes documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks, there really is no better option out there than Microsoft Office.
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
> OnlyOffice
Best Latvian office suite?
It sure is!
(I am quite aware of the controversy around the suite but I don’t think the controversy has enough meat on its bones for me to care about it, especially when I barely use these applications as it stands. I just really don’t like LibreOffice by comparison in terms of the UI and overall experience.)
Not OP, but I like OnlyOffice for its keytips support (tap alt and then the whole ribbon gives you live hints for navigating and executing UI functions/buttons with the keyboard). Far ahead of LibreOffice, at least at the moment.
Excel xlsx, xlsm, xlsb, xls, xltx, xltm, xlt, xlam, xla, xlw, xml, csv, txt, prn, dif, slk, ods, xps, dbf
https://www.onlyoffice.com XLSX, XLS, ODS, CSV, TXT
https://www.libreoffice.org ods, ots, fods, xlsx, xlsm, xls, xlt, xml, csv, dif, dbf, slk
But I'm much to impressed by Modern CSV
https://www.moderncsv.com CSV, JSON, XML
I like CSV for not trying to be an incompetent version of SQL
The main reason there's nothing better is just that everyone is using ms office.
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.
"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.
Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.
Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.
Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.
Its an old classic using an election to kill off or stall projects in ministries or public institutions. I bet some bureaucrat or Statens It doesn't want the trouble of this moving along.
I work in the public sector in Denmark. Office 365 is the bane of my work day. I only have access to the web versions of the apps, but they feel like toys. It seems impossible to do anything even moderately complex with them. Especially form design. I've installed Linux+LibreOffice on a spare machine at work that I use occasionally, to keep from tearing my hair out.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
I think all 365 subscriptions give you access to the real desktop apps? Word and Excel desktop remain class leading on the desktop.
It used to be near impossible for Open Office to get documents 100% right when opening old files saved with Microsoft Word 95 or whatever.
But now with AI I guess you could just ask it to debug the issue and it would decompile Word in 5 minutes and pull out the fix.
Not sure what the frustrations with typography were, but I recon they're a lot easier to fix now.
But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
> But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
You never saw a load-bearing Excel sheet. Like if this formula stops working, there's no payroll.
Not payroll but 15 years ago I worked in a fairly large company where billing (in a smaller subdivision) was completely reliant on excel.
Should even be possible to have an AI operate the computer, screen record the application and build a document that looks identical. Build them on demand with a cache.
It’s hard to parse the complaints in these transitions. Sometimes there has to be a change in process, sure, or even some genuine incompatibility. But a huge percent is social.
About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.
I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.
>everybody felt they’d need a training course.
in my experience there might be a few people for whom "the icons are different, i need a training course" is a legitimate concern. but for the vast majority of workers, it's not "i need a training course" it's "i feel like i can get away with demanding a training course" with the full knowledge that asking for a training course will derail the effort to make a change.
That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."
I find that people who demand or complain about training tends to be a really good filter for people that are hard to work with or intellectually incurious.
Way back in the original dot-com boom some people where I worked were concerned about how we'd provide training for our web product. The CTO shut that down with "if users need training to use our website, we've already failed."
Stick to conventions, don't reinvent the wheel, and training needs should be minimal.
Very few people who know MS Office could not pick up LibreOffice and be fine with it.
Maybe this worked in the dot-com boom. UI expectations have changed since then, mostly for the worse.
Ya, honestly fuck training. People who demand training in order to fly an airliner or operate power tools or conduct surgery are just hard to work with and intellectually incurious. They should be able to figure it out based on YouTube videos and ChatGPT prompts.
> replies to comment about training to use word processing software, and compares it to three life-critical highly complex fields
- Hey, can you please answer my questions? - No, I merely work here.
Yeah, there are people who think that they are being paid to be at work, not to do work, to apply themselves, to engage, to provide and produce. And it sucks to work with those kinds of people.
For real! I’m so tired of hearing “don’t ask me I just work here…”
I always go with: It is your job to answer. The extended version: If you don't like it you can search for a different job where you won't get questions from me.... but there probably will be others with similar questions or even harder ones. etc basically go on endlessly about the hypothetical them working someplace else. Next time it happens I return to the subject.
Then a coworker showed an even more sophisticated version of the same joke. He created a nearly identical relationship but he would look for job offers matching their resume and pitch them. Look, this is closer to where you live and the pay is better!
My wife cried when I tried to make her use LibreOffice.
Maybe you shouldn't have had divorce papers be the example document she started with
I don't know why but I laughed
That's because it was funny. It's okay to acknowledge that sometimes jokes are funny.
Have you seen CraftApps [0]? They are "clean room" implementations of MS Word (WordCraft), MS Excel (GridCraft) and MS PowerPoint (DeckCraft), among others.
[0] https://getartcraft.com/apps
LLMs can't "clean room" so they are just "copies."
presumably Office source code isn't in the LLM's training data. so it would be a clean room implementation of Office.
They trained an LLM on office source code, it didn't demonstrate knowledge, logic, or respect for authority so they ironically named it grok.
If anything it got worse. We've been looking at those icons for so long now that if you change it I'm not going to be happy.
My mom still uses OpenOffice at her job (municipality), and honestly they haven't really felt a huge difference, they still get their work done like before, but heck there were some training to do as they were switching. I suspect at this point they would need the same training just to get back to word etc.
> OpenOffice
That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years, and has had known unaddressed security vulnerabilities for... what is it now, a year? Two years?
That is a dead project. Please Tell your mom to tell her bosses they really should switch to LibreOffice. Which is simply the continued development of the same thing. The municipality can write the Document Foundation and ask for assistance:
https://thedocumentfoundation.org/
and there are of course commercial companies which do LO transitions too.
>…That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years
The last OpenOffice release was 10 days ago. Not 12 years.
https://openoffice.apache.org/downloads.html
It might actually have been Libra. It was part of the whole get away from MS thing.
China has been successful (I guess?) in switching to WPS for civil servants and state-owned companies employees. As long as you don't have to worry about 100% compatibility with MS Office, you have a lot of options. But if you are working with others using MS Office, you will get things like font issues in Word and Powerpoint, and financial models in Excel is just hopeless.
Most of the govt stuff is paperwork moved to "digital" paperwork using office. I sincerely hope to see a post with a title "X govt drops using any office program at all". Most of these stuff can be just CRUD apps on approval workflows with built-in digital signatures. Govt officers would not need more than browsers for majority of these daily tasks.
I guess you mean that now people make forms or documents then wither email them or they print sign and scan and send the same. Instead they could have some ERM system that supports the same functionality by just filling forms in the web ui, clicking approve buttons etc. Problem is those won't support the exact thing they need and a docx is editable to say just what you need (getting the erm provider to add a new checkbox is expensive and needs ongoing maintenance subscriptions), and often wet ink signatures are required by law.
Mostly yes. Digital signatures are better than wet signatures in almost every aspects. I've lived in Turkey, where the e-signatures are mostly limited to govt institutions, and Estonia, where the e-signatures are everywhere for everyone. Maybe moving to the digital certificates are a prerequisite of independence from Office tools.
I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
> despite the alleged format compatibility
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
> Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.
> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.
Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.
Why should an incompatibility between X and Y be blamed solely on X?
Because there are enough signs that MS does this intentionally, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
Have you tried [0]? It can source values from CSV file and after configuring a label and sheet template you should be able to use it to print filled labels.
Can be used it with a thermal label printer and with generic label sheets if you are willing to hand tweak templates.
[0] https://glabels.org/
Maybe there should be an app just for doing mail-merge. That should be fairly simple I assume?
You could try changing your process, use something like getgrist.com.
At what point does implementing it yourself become a savings?
AI agents can make quick work of a task like this and build out a bespoke script to get it done. However, at that point you’ve shifted a 365 subscription cost to a Claude subscription cost (and you also get Copilot usage with either of the 365 plans anyway).
In the best case that's a one-time cost though.
When you can use your software without the USA government snooping your data.
Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.
https://bounties.fulu.org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167818
MIT encourages future commerical capture. I can download your MIT source and go make a company and a million dollars, and you don't get shit. GPL is what you want if you don't want commercial entities to be able to use your code and then run off and make a ton of money and never have to release the source code.
But the MIT source remains open, yeah? Do I care if someone tries to make money with the open code? Not really, as long as the open code generated remains open and can not be gated for economic returns. Certainly, it would be different if I would expect to try to build a business off of "source available" code.
It can't be gated in the obvious way, it can be gated in less obvious ways. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.
Knew this was coming after reading the history of Microsoft in Latin America.
Please can you take the time to elaborate. The comment as you have left it doesn't add much without explanation. There is more and more of this on hacker news.
That's not true, it adds innuendo.
Is this like the history of Coca-Cola in Latin America
Or the horrifying American Fruit Company (Chiquita now) in South America ?
Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.
That was Dole, according to the Hawaiians I know.
Maybe the Greenland deal had secret provisions on sticking with microsoft /s
It's all set forth under section 1, 'Notice of invasion', subsection 3, 'conditional treatment of natives'.
I don't get this. Of all the software suites out there, MS Office must be the easiest to replace. LibreOffice does everything needed, and its free. It's a no brainer.
Unless people do any sort of semi-serious work in Excel. Nothing compares with Excel.
I get where these places are coming from - it is really easy to get started implementing these workflows in Excel and just grow it from there. But they are really fragile and hard to audit - who knows whether they work correctly even now! And it's highly likely that only very few people actually understand how they work and how to maintain and extend them. Great for job security, but there is going to be a lot of problems when the people who know them are not available anymore. Better to transition the embedded knowledge to something more maintainable as long as it's still possible.
That's exactly why it's hard to migrate them off from whatever they are using - which is Excel.
I interviewed at a job with quite a lot of maths to do. I never worked in that industry, but I made a good profolio using Jupyter notebooks so I got an interview. Turns out everything was done in Excel, they asked me a few times how good I was with Excel. It seems they are not impressed with an answer of “Yea, that’s easy, I do my personal budgeting with it”
Exactly. Especially the backwards compatibility. You can have sheets from decades ago still giving useful results.
Expect problems as soon as the people who made and maintain them are gone.
I think the problem is that people view MS Office as the "standard", and therefore any deviation is considered "wrong" or "broken".
I take it you’re a software engineer and have never seen even a single percent of all things people use Office for.
Europe really can’t even do something as simple as replacing office with all the good options available, but we are pretending they are going to replace Starlink, SpaceX, Anthropic/OpenAI and Tesla…
It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.
In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.
I agree that Europe as a collective is lagging behind. But, without the EU it would be much worse. Imagine having to deal with each members’ bureaucracy with rules that might contradict each other. That’s where we were. For trade and collaboration within the EU this is preferable. Even for countries outside this is beneficial: you only need to consider one set of regulations and tariffs.
While writing this, the thought occurs that having a single authority and regulator puts little checks on the amount of regulation. Whereas multiple competing countries could limit it to not have their own industries at a disadvantage. The EU, of course, has this in relation to China, US, etc., so I don’t know…
People like to blame the bureaucrats in Brussels for everything. They have nothing to do with the decision of the Danish government.
You say "all the good options available", but the truth is that there aren't any. Clearly LibreOffice is not a good option for them, for some reason which you are unaware of.
then perhaps they can contribute to it?
Lot of comments here taking this at face value, but isn’t it possible this was always a negotiation tactic on licensing costs?
Also wonder if this is eg MS offering a good deal at the eleventh hour to stop it going ahead, or if they called their bluff
This isn't the first time I see news like that.
I have a feeling that those threats to move away from MS Office just a way to negotiate a better price.
European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
You know, now with AI assuming the other side actually knows what they're doing this can work surprisingly well, to the point that I do it sometimes.
100%. Most people are not programmers. Most people do not see software as something interesting to figure out. It's just a tool for them to do their job.
To get the average office worker to want to switch, you not only have to provide a finished product that works smoothly, but also one that feels familiar. Most office workers grind through their day doing repetitive tasks in familiar software they have been using for a decade. When the top of the food chain says they are overhauling the entire software suite that people have been grown accustomed to for their entire career, the new software better have real benefits that incentivise employees to actually engage with learning it. Otherwise productivity will simply crater.
Most office workers do not care to learn new software. They just want to get on with their job. For better or for worse. But if you can demonstrate a switch will make their lives easier and the UI UX of the new software is very familiar and intuitive (and it actually works) you may be able to pull off a clean switch and keep your employees happy.
An MVP is fine but I think it's crucial that the UI UX is very similar to the software that it is replacing because it means people don't have to relearn whatever habits they have developed over the years in the old stack. I think that's what creates the most resistance to change.
This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
I'd sign up for tenders, but they all seem to require a company with "1 million EUR revenue in public sector <whatever> projects" and 5 people with various roles, degrees and X years of experience in <whatever>.
I'm just a freelancer with FLOSS experience and some commercial experience, and so are plenty other FLOSS contributors. Nobody's going to create a company and hire staff just to have a chance at getting selected in the one tender a year that allows outsiders in.
The idea might be that only companies which have already proven themselves elsewhere can enter, but 1) then why the "public sector work revenue" requirement? And 2) that's not going to work for industries where government interest is much larger than private interest, like FLOSS.
But I suppose governments prefer the certainty that Accenture or local equivalents bring - a price an order of magnitude too high for a mediocre result and a 25% chance that the project will be fucked up and shelved, over the uncertainty of a small startup, who could either deliver something great, or overexert themselves and not finish at all...
I think a lot of these massive tendering companies got started by meeting tenders they didn't get. Like for Microsoft, first they added all the features that were necessary for the tenders, and only after that, they started winning tenders. That's the story of the Windows NT POSIX subsystem that nobody ever needed.
It also helps to be flexible with the truth. If you get this one million dollar tender then you'll be doing one million dollars of business with the government so you can check that box.
If you meet all checkboxes, have the lowest price and still don't get the tender, you can usually sue the government for corruption. These processes are strictly regulated to avoid that.
It should be about features and price, but those only matter after you clear the bar. At least in the Czech Republic, you can't bullshit your way through the requirements like you can with job interviews, these things are actually checked.
Also here you can't sue directly, you can file a complaint with the oversight bureau, which regularly happens just because a competitor is mad at not being selected, but that's a different problem...
It's usually clear to all parties that the tendering process is theatre, and they've already picked the company that'll get the contract
Which doesn't change the fact that you need a corporate entity to be there to actually deploy and maintain the software you're pushing - and for a longer time than a few months before you get bored.
French gendarmerie ditched it a while ago, went to use Linux on all compares and been doing fine for decades.
There is no technical reason to be impossible, the issue is political.
Corruption promoted by American lobbies onto European government and preventing any actual decision.
When people in charge “have balls”, it does work.
Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
> But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology
Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change
This can't be the reason because current Microsoft products change constantly.
> no English language web page of course
If it's AI ... the whole point this version of AI was invented was translation. That's what transformers are for. So why don't they build versions of the apps and pages in every language under the sun from Aztec to Zaparo, from Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform?
It's French, sponsored by the French government. They may well end up translating it to all those languages except English.
Because they can (partially) legally be held liable to the content of these pages. And because AI-translations often still feel cheap and unnatural
Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
> Absolute shit.
> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.
EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.
American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it difficult to compete with them.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
> American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it very difficult to compete with them.
American big tech companies have to pay their workers a lot more than European tech companies.
Microsoft has to pay local taxes on sales in those countries. They are not paying American tax rates on European sales.
Even their American corporate tax rates, if raised to European levels, would still have ample room for profit.
Your argument is not supported by the data.
> but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
It’s nothing like economic dumping. America is not pumping money into Microsoft to dump Microsoft Office into European markets.
Those European companies could come to the US, open an office here, and be under the exact same rules as Microsoft.
The situation is not alike at all.
I don't think American big tech pays their workers that much more once you factor in tax and social security contributions of the employer, actual hours worked (vs. vacation and sick days taken) etc. etc.
Nobody was talking about sales tax.
The collusion of US big tech with Ireland to pay very little taxes is well documented. You mention many unrelated facts that are mostly irrelevant to the discussion.
Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
The situation is, in fact, quite alike to chinese state-sponsored companies. The main difference being the tone of media coverage about it in the western world.
> Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
That's not a subsidy. That's a customer paying for a product. Apart from that, the USA has Anti-Trust laws, and Microsoft has been at the receiving end of these in the past.
Sure, but if the customer is tax-funded and pays a lot more than the product is worth, that's just a hidden subsidy.
And yes Anti-Trust laws and enforcement exist in theory, and occasionally get applied, leading to small fines. Which is in line with what I wrote. Anti-Trust action has been severely lacking, and I assume that was by design.
OK so lower corporate taxes then. Easy. If that enables European tech companies to grow and prosper then this will actually increase net tax revenue even if the rates are lower.
If the European Commission actually thought Element was absolute shit, I don't think their management would have come along to The Matrix Conference last week and presented the project as a success: https://cfp.2026.matrix.org/matrix-conference-2026/talk/YHV8.... As someone else said, the quote is pure propaganda.
Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.
This famous Absolute shit quote is pure propaganda. In fact MS teams is the absolute shit, compared to Matrix.
Just fire the naysayers (for refusing to work) and you have one problem less.
Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).
Who aimed the "nation of shopkeepers" epithet at the US?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_shopkeepers
It starts in Wealth of Nations, was picked up by a French revolutionary (still aimed at England, but in a more negative way), and Ben Franklin said something similar about Holland.
The issue with building alternatives is always that it is quite easy to get something that can do 90% or more of the work, but the remainder takes a lot more time to pull off.
Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.
The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
Those are not alternatives.
For many, they are. In particular, the person I'm replying to said:
> Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
If the quotation were correct, the things I listed would always be, instead of sometimes being.
Google Docs and OpenOffice* have been alternatives to MS Office that were actually used in places I've worked, too.
* this was before LibraOffice
You can't clone decades of history.
> Now that software is cheap
Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.
Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.
That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.
Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.
> Europe will never slow
I am not sure about the word choice, but they, ...
> European governments
probably like BDSM or something.
Neverthelessx having the ability to use clones helps when negotiating with MS.
It's been over 20 years since I saw the first announcements that the German government is moving to Linux + OpenOffice.
Any day now.
Will come the day Microsoft stops bribing politicians to stay on MS Office and Windows.
It will come the day open source developers prioritize the same things enterprises and governments do.
Profit and popularity?
Mostly just usability.
Also somebody to call (or sue) when it doesn't work right.
Many open-source programs have great usability. It’s just that a lot of people define “usability” as “works as closely to Microsoft equivalent as possible”, which is not really fair.
Basically all Microsoft software is bad. It’s obtuse, slow, unintuitive garbage. But people get very used to it, and are fantastic at navigating around and getting their job done. I should hope so, they’ve had decades.
Governments are free to pay consultants to fix it. It's Open Source after all.
If even a tenth of all government licence fees went to improve open source alternatives, they would surpass Microsoft within a year. And every human on earth would benefit.
Instead we're being extorted by Microsoft for buggy software
Good luck with MS support when things go wrong. Your ticket will bounce between 7 different engineering services which will try their basic debug script before tossing you to another department, all after calling you at 4am.
Also, MS doesn't care anymore since they have the monopoly. Things go wrong? Tough shit you won't migrate somewhere else anyway, and will continue to spend millions for licences.
Yeah you're absolutely right, pretty sure the bribes have nothing to do with it and it's because open source is worse. /s
I mean, the bribes have absolutely everything to do with it but so does the fact that open source alternatives more often than not fall painfully short.
You can always make something better in your spare time.
I’m vibecoding an excel in rust just to see if it can be done and what are the limits.
https://github.com/scosman/freecell
So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.
I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.
It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already an engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good. If someone invested into something like this full-time for 6 months it's hard to imagine what you'd need excel for.
I'm not normally one to quibble about software naming collisions, and I have literally never run MS Windows on any hardware ever in my life.
But this collision seems inauspicious.
It's a spreadsheet app (cells) that's free. FreeCell. I mostly thought it was funny.
The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.
I get it, and I know it, but I still think it's more funny than good.
(but I did not downvote, I suspect that's other peoples' opinions about your optimism :)
If you don’t support PowerQuery (which I don’t see mentioned for IronCalc even as a future goal) you are long way from Excel for many.
All these non US governments have a lot of money in total.
There is also LibreOffice.
Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?
These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.
Are there lobbyists blocking this?
They should have ditched it first and announced it after transition was done.
"alternativ til Microsoft Office-pakke"
That says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".
I know the accounting world MUST have excel.
The Danish effort to emancipate themselves did not last as long as Munich's => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
Possibly some of the newer technologies (to avoid the first and third vowels in the Roman Alphabet) will one day bring liberty.
The difficulty of implementing a replacement for MS Office was never the implementation effort. There are problems where LLMs can help, but the remaining crucial roadblocks are of organizational and political nature.
Is there a version without a paywall?
https://wallhop.io/https://www.computerworld.dk/art/297226/d...
Does this work?
Full Danish text here:
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi. Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.
In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
How is the compatibility for VBA scripts? If not near 100% then it's going to be kind of useless for most enterprises.
THIS should be the top comment. So much of our value comes from those bespoke VBA bowls of spaghetti code that get shit done perfectly the same way for the past 20 years that keep the business going. Even the big banks are like this. Someone else said “load bearing excel sheet” that’s pretty good.
Vibe coding a VBA interpreter would be even easier than Excel.
Sounds good. Do it.
Have you tried opening a big excel file in it? It's actually more pleasant than doing so in Excel (because it's a lot faster than Excel, even on very fast systems. And just that makes it great for financial applications, you know, abusing Excel as a database)