7 ms·

"I genuinely do not understand why other countries put up with this." Maybe because there is no drop in replacement of microsoft and microsoft dependant tools?

• Gigachad 8mo ago
  Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.
  • m000 8mo ago
    France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2]. Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction. It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736 [2] https://github.com/suitenumerique https://github.com/suitenumerique [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent-ban-russian-oil-after-hungary-election-document-shows-2026-02-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...
    • Forgeties79 8mo ago
      What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!
    • Jolter 8mo ago
      Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only. That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).
    • lukan 8mo ago
      "Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting" If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence "So yes, one can (and should) build them. "
    • mgoetzke 8mo ago
      Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.
      • MegaDeKay 8mo ago
        It doesn't need to be "most". "Some" or even "a few" can be enough to make a hell of a mess if those few have created documents that are key to the business in one way or another (proposals, end-user documentation, etc). And there are the other components to the suite like Powerpoint, Excel, and Project to consider.
        • einr 8mo ago
          So then act now, because the best time to act was yesterday, and the longer you wait the worse the mess and pain becomes. Not acting at all is not an option.
      • bdavbdav 8mo ago
        Not sure if you've worked in an office recently, but on google workspace I (we) use very regularly: - Group Editing - this ones hard to get right - Reviewing Tools - Automated document generation - Embedding of data-backed images from 3rd party tools Looking at my wife who works in government, they use it even more heavily, with a lot of complicated formatting, numbering, standards etc going into each document, plus OneDrive collaborative features on top of that. I suspect office-user people are where most of the features get used. Agreed, most people only use 15% of the features, but which 15% that is likely changes quickly person to person.
    • weirdmantis69 8mo ago
      It is way more ridiculous to ask USA to protect you from Russia when you are funding the Russian military with your oil purchases.
  • Johnny555 8mo ago
    The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office. I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows. Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.
    • wasabi991011 8mo ago
      Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?
      • Johnny555 8mo ago
        Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.
        • sho 8mo ago
          Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done my share of forecasting for investors and am quite confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute worst case, just use SQL. The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.
  • clickety_clack 8mo ago
    After using both extensively, there is no comparison between Google and the MS suite. Google’s apps are like a toy version of MS Office.
    • Gigachad 8mo ago
      The Microsoft ones feel broken, buggy, and bloated with decades of crap. I guess there are some people using those weird edge features, but if you don’t, the Google stuff works way better.
  • kube-system 8mo ago
    They're competitive but they're not drop-in replacements. Even office for Mac is not a drop-in replacement for office on Windows. It's pretty trivial to find significant differences that will be in use in any large organization.
    • Gigachad 8mo ago
      Considering every job I’ve had in recent times has involved a switch between Google/Microsoft tools after being acquired, it’s about as drop in as anything gets in tech. Of course no product will be an identical replica of the Microsoft tools, but both get the job done.
      • kube-system 8mo ago
        It depends. If you're writing documents and sending email, it probably not gonna be too tough. If you've got 100,000+ lines of Excel macros, you're gonna need a pretty significant migration.
• lpcvoid 8mo ago
  There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above. The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
  • Foobar8568 8mo ago
    People get a lot of cash, house and other benefits when they pick up suppliers. And if they don't get a direct bribe, for some reasons, they end up as VP of what ever branch more or less directly related to their previous job as client.
    • close04 8mo ago
      Someone yanked your chain with this one. Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft, these cases can't even register in the statistic of the total volume of orders. Every tech company would buy you a house if that worked, when a house is always a rounding error on the value of the contracts we're talking about. They buy it because it's the "safe", "does everything" choice that "everyone else has". It's easier to deal with a single party than it is to get licenses and support from 20 other suppliers that then blame each other when there are issues at the border between 2 of the products. You can talk to anyone else who has Teams, your files are always fully compatible, all of the rest of your software integrates, single identity, etc. A lot of good it is that you have Google Meet and Libre Office when the partners you work closes to have Teams and MS Office. Users are proficient with the products, you can find skilled admins everywhere. Incumbency has a lot of inertia. So you have to pay millions in support contracts every year, it's the cost of doing business. So MS gets hacked every other day, what could you have done about it better when even MS (!!!) couldn't?
      • bobmcnamara 8mo ago
        > Nobody gets a house or a job at Microsoft for buying Microsoft... This is the same Microsoft we're talking about right? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-end-134811427.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-pays-25-million-end... https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-sec-corruption-complaint/178295/ https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-sec-corr... https://www.wsj.com/tech/former-microsoft-employee-alleges-bribery-scheme-in-middle-east-and-africa-11648221986 https://www.wsj.com/tech/former-microsoft-employee-alleges-b... Any fines that allow profitable operations are no more than a tax.
• hermanzegerman 8mo ago
  For many services there are drop-in Replacements available. I don't see what's so special about Mail or Calendar from Microsoft vs other vendors. The Quality is also Shit. I get some stupid Errors when trying to Access OWA every other day. Then I have to reset cookies/cache and can login again
  • mrweasel 8mo ago
    You don't want a drop-in replacement for each service, you want one for the entire system. Microsofts advantage is ActiveDirectory integration. Centrally managed users and machines, every user, every application, every service authentications through the AD. Organizations opt for Teams all the time, because it's part of the package and fully integrated. There's no reason they couldn't pick something else, but why deal with it when Teams just work (sort of).
    • redkoala 8mo ago
      Is there a combination of open standards to drop in to replace AD integration with self management? OAuth enabled systems aren’t enough, central management of users and machines are huge. If that core matures, it opens up the market for replacements in other areas. Teams, Outlook and the Office Suite need first grade replacements.
    • hermanzegerman 8mo ago
      And OpenDesk has managed to do without, they seem to be using Univention Nubus as an AD Replacement https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-microsoft-active-directory/ https://www.univention.de/loesungen/alternative-zu-microsoft...
  • wolvoleo 8mo ago
    Yes and they keep blocking features in Firefox on Linux. When I change the user agent to match edge on windows things suddenly work fine. When it's set to Firefox attachment uploads don't work and ever morning it jumps to "please wait while we're signing you out..." when i never asked for that. When it thinks it's edge it just stays signed in. Not to mention the huge amount of telemetry I need to block with ublock origin.
• wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Well, if your goal is to be 100% the same as what Microsoft offer, then sure no there's not. But that's letting them set the goalposts. If you look at the features you actually need and are willing to explore different ways of doing things that are not exactly like M365 there's more options. France and Germany are also working on freeing themselves from M365. This kinda thing sounds a lot like those RFPs that were specifically written so they could only be fulfilled by Microsoft because it was just a list of their feature tickboxes.
  • KronisLV 8mo ago
    > But that's letting them set the goalposts. This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there. You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU. Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even trying is just preseving the status quo.
    • Guestmodinfo 8mo ago
      Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine. Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on the windows machine of the sender. I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or something like that. But that's like just for developers suffering. Most govt offices or universities just work on individual files and that will never suffer even one bit
      • KronisLV 8mo ago
        I mean, to be honest, I've historically had most software out there break in all sorts of ways, LibreOffice had some interesting issues while working on my thesis: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/libreoffice-bibliography-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/libreoffice-bibliography-is-bro... (bit of a rant back then, when I had a section on my blog called "Everything is broken", but you get the idea) But yeah, it probably depends on what you're trying to do with any one software package, some people will be affected more than others and sometimes most stuff will just work!
• rconti 8mo ago
  The best time to do this was ~2010 before all of the cloud lock-in stuff. The second best time is now.
• throwyawayyyy 8mo ago
  What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?