13 ms·

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented

The germans have been tinkering with policies mandating non-cloud dependent products for a while wondering if this is a start of it actually getting implemented on a large scale or if the delay attempts will remain successful elsewhere across the region. If this is a start of an actual migration away from cloud dependence, it's a matter of time before windows(which is as cloud dependent as office those days for enterprise management features) itself is targeted, and the entire federation of germany changing from ms office formats to odf in practice could set some interesting balls in motions. But as we have seen this before where a product is started and then sabotaged or delayed by lobbying and inertia from people who dont want to change how theyve always done things, it could be another one-off that dont set a trend.

daeros 3y ago
sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions? Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it. Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.
  - Stranger43 3y ago
    The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).
    - Rinzler89 3y ago
      And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal. Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?
      - fifteen1506 3y ago
        Of course. Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans. Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant. Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.
      - morsch 3y ago
        Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    > Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.
    - ctrw 3y ago
      Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.
      - rchaud 3y ago
        Agreed. A lot of "new tech" are just cloud versions of what used to be on-premise services.
      - digging 3y ago
        > There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. Now there's a hot take! I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?
        CRConrad 2y ago
        There's been very little actually useful new in computing since the arpanet was invented. None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that. HTH!
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    When did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.
  - shrubble 3y ago
    You mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?
    - panzi 3y ago
      Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).
      - quesera 3y ago
        PDF is easy to read. It's a ridiculous document format for the purpose of internal sharing and reading, but it still works well for that purpose. But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting? I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.
        panzi 3y ago
        Well, my viewer doesn't support embedded scripting. :D
- zo1 3y ago
  I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage. What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?
  - dubcanada 3y ago
    https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it. The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.
    - rawgabbit 3y ago
      What alternative tool does your CEO prefer?
- freetanga 3y ago
  Every time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”
  - markbranly 3y ago
    Does he laugh it off or get offended? I find a good rep walks the line between customer advocate and company "man".
    - freetanga 3y ago
      Laughs it off. Except the time I said that to his boss and the Western Europe MS Head Sales. That time he skirted it…
  - wg0 3y ago
    Stupid but genuine question because I never used it. How does Office 365 work? Like Office 2007 and such were all MFC/ATL code bases so calling GDI+ and all that. How does it work now? Canvas and Web assembly etc?
    - freetanga 3y ago
      No clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down
    - CRConrad 2y ago
      > How does Office 365 work? I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps). N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.
  - 3y ago
- datenhorst 3y ago
  Is Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.
  - boringg 3y ago
    The fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      Does it? I thought local installs still function offline for up to 48 hours, as long as you haven't passed the last synced expiry date? At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.
      - evilduck 3y ago
        They better never have Monday outages then.
      - Spooky23 3y ago
        It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon. Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.
        boringg 3y ago
        Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.
  - daeros 3y ago
    Google's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.
  - rawgabbit 3y ago
    Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre. Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem. Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.
      - rawgabbit 3y ago
        There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint? [2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access". [3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company. SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-files-or-folders-1fe37332-0f9a-4719-970e-d2578da4941c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-... ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-files-and-folders-9fcc2f7d-de0c-4cec-93b0-a82024800c07#ID0EDBJ=Share_with_specific_people https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...
- cjk2 3y ago
  I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!
Havoc 3y ago
Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state. Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...
- sgift 3y ago
  The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies". (MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)
  - mattalex 3y ago
    The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project. The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized. That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut. The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux. The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset. Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existing software are all significant. So you go from cheap software to free software, but from cheap IT staff to expensive, perhaps-incompetant, hard-to-replace IT staff. If the savings aren't real then the fallback argument is privacy etc. But Libre Office runs fine on Windows. So by all means start there.
pixelpoet 3y ago
Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?
- lrvick 3y ago
  Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.
  - croes 3y ago
    Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246
    - dewey 3y ago
      There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.
    - trelane 3y ago
      The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.
      - croes 3y ago
        But the impact is deeper nowadays. What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?
        Liquix 3y ago
        I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.
jrochkind1 3y ago
I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again... 2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software. > However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0. > Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006. — https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval.... > It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007. Oh boy, which also mentions: > Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration. — https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migrate-to-open-source--looks-to-open-standards-instead.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migra... So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)
- ckw460 2y ago
7thaccount 3y ago
I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I could swear this has happened before…
FloatArtifact 3y ago
I hope they set aside some budget/resources to contribute back to the open source ecosystem
- NekkoDroid 3y ago
  They already do at least a bit :) https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/

daeros 3y ago

sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing.

Rinzler89 3y ago
What's the alternative? Would they be able to do more without cloud office solutions? Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it. Would hosting an on-prem alternative yeld better cost and a higher uptime? I doubt it.
- Stranger43 3y ago
  The drive here is to reduce dependencies to locations the state itself have jurisdiction over i.e. things that can be controlled. It's essentially to avoid having the states data taken hostage when the slowly brewing conflict between America's lack of respect for it's foreign partners data protection regulation and the EU's very popular trend towards less and less tolerance for corporate data abuse comes to an head and we see actual blocks being mandated on high-security networks against US data harvesting companies(of which MS is but one).
  - Rinzler89 3y ago
    And how do you do that? You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? Companies buy Office 365 subscriptions so they can focus on their main business and don't want to think about their office solution and want something that JustWorks which is already compatible with what everyone else uses. They have a business to run and money to makes, so spending extra time and effort on alternative office solutions with various degrees of compatibility, just to fight a virtual trade war, will slow then down significantly from their main business goal. Why do you think Google uses SAP instead of rolling out their own solution? You think they don't have the technical know-how, or is it because it's not worth the effort and better use what everyone else is already using and focus your resoruces on what really matters?
    - fifteen1506 3y ago
      Of course. Same thing will all those environmental laws shenanigans. Companies are better off investing in short-term gains and leave the governments taking care of the environment and digital accountability of its citizens.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > You think EU companies will stop buying Office 365 subscriptions to reduce their dependency on the US? I don't think they will stop, but they will become much more hesitant. Concerning your other points: it is of similar economic importance for the company to invest in precautions to prevent that you are taken hostage of, in this case by Microsoft. Thus such measures are actually often in the company's self-interest in opposite to fighting a virtual trade war for someone else.
    - morsch 3y ago
      Governments can take a longer and more strategic outlook than private enterprises. It's not even primarily about nationalistic trade wars: I want my tax euros to fund as little closed-source software as possible. It's crazy how much money even just our schools spend for software that can't be freely redistributed or modified. That said, I'm not holding my breath regarding the success of this most recent move.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > Like in the days long last we used to email .doc files to each other? I doubt it How long ago are we talking? I was sharing files with coworkers on a shared network drive 20 years ago. I could send files via IM as well back then.
  - ctrw 3y ago
    Listening to people talk about the 00s like we barely invented fire is something else. There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. The cloud is someone's mainframe and we moved away from those for the same reason why government wants to leave the cloud.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Agreed. A lot of "new tech" are just cloud versions of what used to be on-premise services.
    - digging 3y ago
      > There's been very little new in computing since the arpanet was invented. Now there's a hot take! I suppose for this assertion to work, you'd have to consider Arpanet orders-of-magnitude more sophisticated an advancement than modern gaming, blockchain, VR, LLMs with fully integrated real-time image processing... all just minor increments?
      - CRConrad 2y ago
        There's been very little actually useful new in computing since the arpanet was invented. None of the shit you mentioned is a counterexample to that. HTH!
- prmoustache 3y ago
  When did people stop doing that? Last time I checked (which was our soc2 audit last year) most people didn't understand the sharing/collaborative features of sharepoint/office365 and were still doing it.
- shrubble 3y ago
  You mean emailing .doc files around to co-workers, like what happened yesterday?
  - panzi 3y ago
    Nowadays they mail .docx around, haven't seen a .doc in a long time. I'm a software dev on Linux and haven't even LibreOffice installed. I tell the sender to please send it to me as .pdf. I write docs in markdown on GitHub (the company I work for uses GitHub, make of it what you will).
    - quesera 3y ago
      PDF is easy to read. It's a ridiculous document format for the purpose of internal sharing and reading, but it still works well for that purpose. But PDF is not really optimized for editing or collaboration, and the tools available on Linux especially are limited.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I like PDFs when I trust them, but I’m always a bit wary receiving them from random people. Don’t they support embedded scripting? I’d like a format that is like PDF, but markup only.
      - panzi 3y ago
        Well, my viewer doesn't support embedded scripting. :D
zo1 3y ago
I live in a badly-maintained, "3rd world" country, and since we got office 365 maybe a half decade ago (probably more) it's been down once, for one afternoon. And that was due to what looks like an undersea cable sabotage. What kind of internet/IT department do you have where you have any sort of regular office outage?
- dubcanada 3y ago
  https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status https://twitter.com/MSFT365Status just scrolling through there is several outages, Teams, performance issues, etc. However it does tend to be only a specific area/country or a set of products rather then all of Office 365.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  Recently we had a Teams outage at work that wasn't AWFULLY disruptive, but the only reason that is is that we don't depend on 365 cloud services to get anything done. We use Slack for chat features and more casual calling services (non-meeting) though of course Teams managed to be down on a meeting-heavy day, and we ended up organizing Slack huddles to get around it. The only real cloud service we use is OneDrive and the CEO is pushing us to get away from it because it has all kinds of strange problems with file permissions and we constantly have to call IT to unlock files.
  - rawgabbit 3y ago
    What alternative tool does your CEO prefer?
freetanga 3y ago
Every time my MS rep brings up O365 I correct him: “it’s Office 363. It does not work twice a year”
- markbranly 3y ago
  Does he laugh it off or get offended? I find a good rep walks the line between customer advocate and company "man".
  - freetanga 3y ago
    Laughs it off. Except the time I said that to his boss and the Western Europe MS Head Sales. That time he skirted it…
- wg0 3y ago
  Stupid but genuine question because I never used it. How does Office 365 work? Like Office 2007 and such were all MFC/ATL code bases so calling GDI+ and all that. How does it work now? Canvas and Web assembly etc?
  - freetanga 3y ago
    No clue. But the most painful point is not so much loosing web-based apps (we still have local versions) but Teams, OneDrive and some management tools which are moot if services are down
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > How does Office 365 work? I think that depends on which part of "Office 365" you mean: The name itself is, as I understand it, a moniker for pretty much all Office products nowadays, both the "MS Office in the browser" and the "traditional MS Office applications". More of an all-encompassing marketing label than any specific product. So the free-standing MS Word / Excel / Outlook etc I use at work are "Office 365" just as the webpage equivalents I could use in stead (but don't, because they're still pretty massively inferior to the standalone apps). N.B: "As I understand it"; I could be wrong as Hell.
- 3y ago
datenhorst 3y ago
Is Office365 really down that often? I'm fortunate enough to not have to use it but I don't hear any complaints from my colleagues that do.
- boringg 3y ago
  The fact that it would even go down and it requires online connection to vacuum up my data is such a bananas level oversight from MS. That company, man, that company.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    Does it? I thought local installs still function offline for up to 48 hours, as long as you haven't passed the last synced expiry date? At least, that's how it used to function way back when I used it and had a not-always-online connection.
    - evilduck 3y ago
      They better never have Monday outages then.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      It doesn’t. These guys are probably still upset about the ribbon. Microsoft is not my favorite company. But the only reason O365 has been down for days is when customer integrations (identity, security stuff, VPN rules, etc) break. That was even true in the early days before 365 branding. Source: I’ve been accountable for 250k+ user O365 environments as a customer director or VP for over a decade.
      - boringg 3y ago
        Really? Or did that not make its way up the chain of command? None of your 250k+ accounts had issues because they didn't connect to the internet? What about license renewals - did anyone get shut out of their account immediately because they missed a license renewal date and happy to be off the internet?
andsoitis 3y ago
> sane policy. Every time Office 365 is down I watch the maddening dash of IT workers who can't get anything done, it's amusing. While there might be issues with Office 365's reliability (I don't know, I use Google Docs), the online collaborative capabilities is a fantastic tradeoff. Mailing individual files amongst a group of collaborators impede productivity (even though it has other benefits). You could make the argument that cloud solutions are not a prerequisite for collaborative tools like Office 365 or Google Docs, but desktop peer-to-peer systems like those that Groove Networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groove_Networks) tried to create did not take off.
- daeros 3y ago
  Google's collaberative is probably miles ahead. it's been awhile, I've not used it since I was paying for Japanese lessons.
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  Hmmm. Compared to Google Docs and Google Drive, Microsoft's collaboration is just bizarre. Yes, under ideal conditions, teams of people technically could use Microsoft to edit and review documents online at the same time. I have yet to see it in a real world setting. Often times, where I work, we just get confused by OneDrive's links vs direct sharing vs personal onedrive vs sharepoint onedrive. And we end up sharing multiple copies of the same file on Teams which is another source of confusion.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    I don't know what you consider ideal conditions, but we do it all the time. It's pretty common for me to be reviewing a document and see the avatars of other people who are simultaneously reviewing and editing it. I've been doing this for years and have yet to have a problem. Sharing multiple copies of the "same" file is where the problems come in.
    - rawgabbit 3y ago
      There are multiple issues. [1] If you drag/drop or upload the file to Teams, it creates a copy and shares it via Teams SharePoint? [2] If you look in Teams, some people have automatic permissions because they are in the Team or already have access to the Teams folder. If they are not in the Team, then you have to give "direct access". [3] For the paranoid, you first go into OneDrive and "manage access". Then you are faced with two choices whose UX is confusing to say the least. One option is to "Copy Link" which has almost the same identical choices as "Share with Specific People". Note that "Share with Specific People" gives you options like "Anyone/doesn't require sign in" and the dialog has a button called "Copy Link". Huh? I thought I was sharing with specific people. I am still unsure who exactly can see the document. Or if the document was shared externally outside of my company. SHAREPOINT https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-files-or-folders-1fe37332-0f9a-4719-970e-d2578da4941c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-sharepoint-... ONEDRIVE https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-files-and-folders-9fcc2f7d-de0c-4cec-93b0-a82024800c07#ID0EDBJ=Share_with_specific_people https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-onedrive-fi...
cjk2 3y ago
I use O365 all day across two orgs and have done for about 5 years. Never had a problem. Not once!

Havoc 3y ago

Yeah last time with Munich they moved back to MS after MS just so happened to move their HQ to that state. Microsoft is clearly keen to avoid this becoming a thing. If governments can shift successfully then so can businesses https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-headquarters/ https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-germany-moves-into-a-new-h...

sgift 3y ago
The link is just about a move from one part of Munich to another (MS German HQ has always been in Munich). From what I remember it was more that we had a coalition with the CSU for four years and unsurprisingly, the moment conservatives were part of the cities government all went back to "help the companies". (MS had tried to pressure against the move from the start, but wasn't really successful in the first years)
- mattalex 3y ago
  The problem was mostly that the only guy that was really backing the project (Christian Ude, SPD), was replaced with his successor (Dieter Reiter, SPD) who just didn't have the drive necessary to maintain the project. The entire design of "LiMux" was doomed from the start: it was a highly customized version of Ubuntu that was only used in Munich (not even throughout the entire state). That made everything ridiculously expensive since the actual advantages of building on an open source solution was never realized. That is combined with the fact that "open source" and "cost savings" were used interchangeably when in reality the budget for Windows should have been pre-allocated into development, rather than cut. The entire project was half-assed to begin with, which basically meant that Windows and Linux had to coexist since many crucial tools were never ported to Linux. The "Microsoft killed it" story sounds realistic, but the truth is the much more boring incompetence in execution.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    I've no doubt that there was incompetence involved. Which is to be somewhat expected since Linux requires a set of skills to install and administer at scale, and few people have that particular skillset. Equally I'm sure it was never going to be a cost saving exercise since firstly the cost of Windows is negligible, and second the conversion costs, in-house skill requirements, re-training of users, and porting existing software are all significant. So you go from cheap software to free software, but from cheap IT staff to expensive, perhaps-incompetant, hard-to-replace IT staff. If the savings aren't real then the fallback argument is privacy etc. But Libre Office runs fine on Windows. So by all means start there.

pixelpoet 3y ago

Do the americans exclusively use MS Office in government computers?

lrvick 3y ago
Yes. Most schools too. Microsoft has incredible political power here.
- croes 3y ago
  Even after CISA's review of the summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange online intrusion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39929246
  - dewey 3y ago
    There's stories like this for every big vendor. This rarely has any impact.
  - trelane 3y ago
    The phrase is, "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." It's descended from the same phrase, applied to IBM, when they were the power.
    - croes 3y ago
      But the impact is deeper nowadays. What was the worst that could happen when you bought IBM back then?
      - Liquix 3y ago
        I think the sentiment is less that something catastophic can't happen by depending on M$ - it's more that you personally will never be blamed for their servers going down. Whereas if you advocate for a smaller/more open solution and that blows up in the company's face, it's your ass on the line.

jrochkind1 3y ago

I feel like I've seen this very headline before in Germany specifically several times over the years, like I keep hearing that Germany is using LibreOffice/OpenOffice. Googling to try to confirm this, I see that OpenOffice began when a program called StarOffice was open-sourced, and StarOffice was originally a German product most popular in Germany, so that could be part of German interest in OpenOffice descendents specifically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History And here's an article that may be what I was thinking of -- but turns out it was about Munich specifically. That has a history of saying it was going to switch to OpenOffice as far back as 2003, that not working out for them, then trying again... 2020: Linux not Windows: Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again: Munich's flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany's political sea change over proprietary software. > However, the decision by the new coalition administration in Germany's third largest and one of its wealthiest cities is just the latest twist in a saga that began over 15 years ago in 2003, spurred by Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows NT 4.0. > Because the city needed to find a replacement for aging Microsoft Windows workstations, Munich eventually began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006. — https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i... And here's a history of Berlin announcing/trying but not getting approval.... > It is the second time the opposition Greens had proposed switching Berlin's 68,000 workstations to open source software, and the second time they failed, said Thomas Birk, the party's spokesman for government modernization, on Wednesday. The earlier effort was in 2007. Oh boy, which also mentions: > Not every migration works though. The city of Freiburg announced in November it would dump OpenOffice and go back to Microsoft because of functionality problems due to a failed migration. — https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migrate-to-open-source--looks-to-open-standards-instead.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2611066/berlin-won-t-migra... So yeah, German localities kind of have a history of trying this out without it actually leading to a sea change, although this one may be larger/at the state level instead of just city/etc. (Although I guess it's wrong to say this hasn't led to a trend -- its' an existing German trend of local governments trying to switch, without it necessarily working out!)

ckw460 2y ago

7thaccount 3y ago

I figured the stated move to open source was a bluff to get a lower license cost.

bee_rider 3y ago
I could swear this has happened before…

FloatArtifact 3y ago

I hope they set aside some budget/resources to contribute back to the open source ecosystem

NekkoDroid 3y ago
They already do at least a bit :) https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/