4 ms·

I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if you

by dabedee 7mo ago

I laud the attempt and I think it's important there are more projects that try to compete with their American counterparts. I do want to gently note that if your entire pitch is "we are a bold, independent European alternative that liberates you from the hegemony of the established American players," maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office."

graypegg 7mo ago
It also possibly sets a false expectation of perfect compatibility… you can imagine bureaucrats trying to figure out if a file needs to be opened in Office or Office (new)
- Avicebron 7mo ago
  Considering that for the average office worker I know switching from outlook to outlook (new) is a major hurdle within the same ecosystem, I can only imagine what they were thinking coming up with a name.
  - enceladus06 7mo ago
    That is not even broaching the sacred domain-specific excel macros which will 100% break when you try and run in this program.
    - Topfi 7mo ago
      That is a very fair point, there are quite a few businesses and government agencies where I live, which are very deeply entrenched in very complex, decade spanning VBA based workflows that need absolute and fully compatibility before a switch away from "MS 365 Copilot" could even be considered and the name may give false expectations. Now, I really, very much dislike it that often discussions on sites like this one can be utterly derailed by someone bringing up an utterly unrelated overhyped topic, so feel free to dismiss this, but I could honestly see LLMs providing a potential path to smoothing out such issues. Some model have gotten rather robust when it comes to making targeted changes to pre-existing Excel files dating back to before I was using a computer, including handling very specific modifications to ancient macros across multiple sheets. Perhaps, this could be leveraged to some extent, though being honest and trying not to overhype, I suspect that similar to those planning to use agentic coding to rewrite decades old, tested, crucially important COBOL code in a more modern language, there are likely many edge cases that will be hard to properly cover and if such a solution isn't both absolutely reliable and seamless to the users, large scale adoption by such entities will likely be impossible in the short term.
  - linhns 7mo ago
    Outlook New somehow to this day, lacks good feature of Outlook
reactordev 7mo ago
I mean, at least the gloves come off, who’s going to come after them for using the name? Microsoft? EU will just invalidate their patents. Done. Bye.
pavlov 7mo ago
To be fair, Microsoft Office doesn't exist anymore as a separate brand: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-office https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi... "Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features." You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?
- ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
  I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
  - rsynnott 7mo ago
    > I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years. (There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
  - cedilla 7mo ago
    Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection). Microsoft does have a figurative trademark for "Office" with the rectangular icon: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/011413556 https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/01141355... - office.eu's logo does not bear any resemblance. The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that. So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name. (I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).
glenstein 7mo ago
For me, the charitable interpretation is that office is very close to a default term for the category of the software. Open Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, Only Office, Polaris Office. One thing that may contribute to Europe's and the world's independence from Office is the notion that it's no longer a term distinctly associated with a Microsoft product. I don't entirely disagree though because they could have attached some distinguishing prefix or suffix. Maybe that's what the .eu is.
- graypegg 7mo ago
  I think they could've worked a little harder to at least find a noun you could futz with so it has some commonality between european languages. "Office" is probably well known, but it doesn't "feel" very european to use a noun that's different from most other EU languages translation. Could be "Productiv" or something. It feels like the federal government here in Canada has a team of language nerds ready to smash together a clever french-english name with two superimposed meanings when needed. ("O-Train", Ottawa Train, Au Train. "Via Rail". "Service Canada". "ArriveCAN". etc) You can't tell me there isn't a few turbo-nerds somewhere in the entire continent of europe that will find the intersection of 6-7 languages to name an EU groupware suite.
  - surgical_fire 7mo ago
    Ireland is in EU. English is the primary language there (even though it is not the original language). Also, English does work as a sort of Lingua Franca across EU countries. Nothing wrong with it.
    - type0 7mo ago
      Correctamente: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
    - graypegg 7mo ago
      I know, that's what I meant by "most other EU language translations". But to me at least, this is a brandable name. Why not do something "unifying" across many european languages, not just something that works in a singular one? It's more of a plea for creativity rather than pragmatism... but I'm arguing for creativity from a government agency... so I might be a bit off base here haha
RobotToaster 7mo ago
Yeah, someone could confuse it with WordPerfect Office, Ability Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, or some other obscure software that uses the word "Office" in it's name.
rsynnott 7mo ago
> maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office." Surely you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"? (I am not making this up. That is what it is called now.) Realistically, though, I think pretty much _all_ office suites have been called [Something] Office, for about the last 30 years. The Google one ("Google Workplace", formerly "Google Apps") is the only exception I can think of, and I wouldn't necessarily take Google's lead in software branding (honestly, until I looked it up for this post, I thought it was still called Google Apps, and I use the damn thing every day).
- SllX 7mo ago
  Well iWork too. Before that, AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, but yeah, there's things like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice which are pretty much all the same lineage (StarOffice and its derivatives). Zoho's is Zoho Office Suite, which at least adds an extra word.
  - rsynnott 7mo ago
    "Work/Works" tended to be used for specifically integrated office suites (AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, and then Microsoft Works). Though iWork is _not_ one, granted. I think integrated office suites have now entirely died out.
    - SllX 7mo ago
      Isn't LibreOffice still an integrated office suite like OpenOffice.org was? I never bothered installing it, so I'm genuinely asking about that one. But Google Workspace would probably count as a fully integrated suite.
      - Maken 7mo ago
        LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.
Topfi 7mo ago
In fairness, Office is as generic a term as one can come up with for such a software suite. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if that fell under Genericide like Lego or Google and, lest we forget, the Microsoft Office brand does not exist anymore, it is 365 and Copilot now...
F7F7F7 7mo ago
That word is not as loaded as you might think it is anymore. At least not with the next generation of users. With your average 18-24 year old swimming in Google Docs, Notion, Monday, Airtable and a dozen others..."Office" will belong to the EU in no time.
dlcarrier 7mo ago
What I get out of that pitch is "use us because we're local to you, and possibly because you're required to, not because we're and good, or that we'll even try". I mostly interact with smaller contributors to their field, and they tend to be unique and bold, because that's what is needed to be competitive. When they get their uniqueness and boldness out of just being who they are, it doesn't tend to foster the type of uniqueness and boldness needed to make a good product.
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  In the current climate, using MS Office is a business risk for European companies. Who knows what idea will pop into ol' minihands' head next time he has a bad day at the golf course? Like, it would _not_ be particularly shocking if at some point in the next 2.5 years he attempts to interfere with the ability of US companies to sell services to Europe. You can no longer depend on "but that would be an obviously terrible idea, so they won't do it" as an operating principle; see the tariffs. Frankly, right now, there is a lot of money to be made in just providing safer alternatives to American cloud stuff. They don't need to be _better_, they just need to be based in a stable jurisdiction.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  The way we are now, it is a liability to rely on foreign technology for anything critical, we should be back to the cold war days, were plenty of countries had their own computers, operating systems, programming languages. It is going to be pleasant? No, and it is going to take a few decades, however we cannot afford to have kill switches in the hands of foreign nations, even if their software is the best in the planet.
ewoodrich 7mo ago
Focusing on the word "Office" feels like a bit of red herring considering it's frequently used in other Microsoft Office replacements like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Something like "EuropaOffice" would have followed the historical pattern so it's specifically the lack of an additional qualifier word that's perhaps questionable, not the word "Office." But it does look like it's always called "Office.EU" in branding so maybe that's enough?
gzread 7mo ago
The product they're replacing is called Microsoft Copilot 365 :) More seriously, Office is a great word for what the software package does, and it can't be trademarked. You can have Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and Europa Office.
zitterbewegung 7mo ago
I thought of it branded not Office generically but “Office.eu” but maybe I am wrong ?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
davnicwil 7mo ago
To be fair, one interpretation is spending innovation tokens wisely. Just piggy back off an already understood concept/brand, don't try to be too clever on the parts where innovating won't matter that much. There's a bit of an issue with the overload of 'office' in the political context, this being an EU initiative and domain but other than that I say good call.
hengheng 7mo ago
The Hackernews snark would likely be worse had they called it 'bureau'.
wolvoleo 7mo ago
Office is like the Xerox of photocopiers these days. It's no longer an enforceable trademark.
pjmlp 7mo ago
Office is just like using Xerox for copiers, Tempo for paper handkerchiefs, Excel for spredsheets, hoover for vacum cleaners,.... some names stick on the common mind.
1718627440 7mo ago
Office is a software category. Just because one competitor names things as "the car"(TM) doesn't mean you can't call your vehicle a car. Also it is (was) actually called Microsoft Office for a reason, because it is the Office software from Microsoft.

by dabedee 7mo ago

graypegg 7mo ago

It also possibly sets a false expectation of perfect compatibility… you can imagine bureaucrats trying to figure out if a file needs to be opened in Office or Office (new)

Avicebron 7mo ago
Considering that for the average office worker I know switching from outlook to outlook (new) is a major hurdle within the same ecosystem, I can only imagine what they were thinking coming up with a name.
- enceladus06 7mo ago
  That is not even broaching the sacred domain-specific excel macros which will 100% break when you try and run in this program.
  - Topfi 7mo ago
    That is a very fair point, there are quite a few businesses and government agencies where I live, which are very deeply entrenched in very complex, decade spanning VBA based workflows that need absolute and fully compatibility before a switch away from "MS 365 Copilot" could even be considered and the name may give false expectations. Now, I really, very much dislike it that often discussions on sites like this one can be utterly derailed by someone bringing up an utterly unrelated overhyped topic, so feel free to dismiss this, but I could honestly see LLMs providing a potential path to smoothing out such issues. Some model have gotten rather robust when it comes to making targeted changes to pre-existing Excel files dating back to before I was using a computer, including handling very specific modifications to ancient macros across multiple sheets. Perhaps, this could be leveraged to some extent, though being honest and trying not to overhype, I suspect that similar to those planning to use agentic coding to rewrite decades old, tested, crucially important COBOL code in a more modern language, there are likely many edge cases that will be hard to properly cover and if such a solution isn't both absolutely reliable and seamless to the users, large scale adoption by such entities will likely be impossible in the short term.
- linhns 7mo ago
  Outlook New somehow to this day, lacks good feature of Outlook

reactordev 7mo ago

I mean, at least the gloves come off, who’s going to come after them for using the name? Microsoft? EU will just invalidate their patents. Done. Bye.

pavlov 7mo ago

To be fair, Microsoft Office doesn't exist anymore as a separate brand: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-office https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-offi... "Office is now Microsoft 365, the premier productivity suite with innovative productivity apps, intelligent cloud services, and world-class security. Office.com, the Office mobile app, and the Office app for Windows are combined in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app—with a new icon, new look, and even more features." You can count on Microsoft to mess up their marketing message in the craziest ways. Why stick with the best-known productivity software brand on the planet when you can call it "365 Copilot"?

ocdtrekkie 7mo ago
I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. Also Microsoft still absolutely sells Office 365 tiers separately from Microsoft 365 tiers. Their marketing is terrible and confusing but Offie definitely still exits as a brand, and you can bet your bottom dollar the lawyers are going to be having a great day on Monday.
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  > I doubt this will stop the lawsuit. I mean, I think that ship has probably sailed. Borland Office showed up at about the same time as Microsoft Office, in the late 80s. Then StarOffice, Corel Office, Wordperfect Office, throughout the 90s... If Microsoft had a defensible trademark there, then this would hardly be the first target. And Microsoft barely uses the "Office" brand _itself_, these days, and hasn't for years. (There is still a product called Microsoft Office, but the thing that most users would think of as MS Office is now, bafflingly, branded "Microsoft 365 Copilot".)
- cedilla 7mo ago
  Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection). Microsoft does have a figurative trademark for "Office" with the rectangular icon: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/011413556 https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/01141355... - office.eu's logo does not bear any resemblance. The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that. So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name. (I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).

glenstein 7mo ago

For me, the charitable interpretation is that office is very close to a default term for the category of the software. Open Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, Only Office, Polaris Office. One thing that may contribute to Europe's and the world's independence from Office is the notion that it's no longer a term distinctly associated with a Microsoft product. I don't entirely disagree though because they could have attached some distinguishing prefix or suffix. Maybe that's what the .eu is.

graypegg 7mo ago
I think they could've worked a little harder to at least find a noun you could futz with so it has some commonality between european languages. "Office" is probably well known, but it doesn't "feel" very european to use a noun that's different from most other EU languages translation. Could be "Productiv" or something. It feels like the federal government here in Canada has a team of language nerds ready to smash together a clever french-english name with two superimposed meanings when needed. ("O-Train", Ottawa Train, Au Train. "Via Rail". "Service Canada". "ArriveCAN". etc) You can't tell me there isn't a few turbo-nerds somewhere in the entire continent of europe that will find the intersection of 6-7 languages to name an EU groupware suite.
- surgical_fire 7mo ago
  Ireland is in EU. English is the primary language there (even though it is not the original language). Also, English does work as a sort of Lingua Franca across EU countries. Nothing wrong with it.
  - type0 7mo ago
    Correctamente: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English
  - graypegg 7mo ago
    I know, that's what I meant by "most other EU language translations". But to me at least, this is a brandable name. Why not do something "unifying" across many european languages, not just something that works in a singular one? It's more of a plea for creativity rather than pragmatism... but I'm arguing for creativity from a government agency... so I might be a bit off base here haha

RobotToaster 7mo ago

Yeah, someone could confuse it with WordPerfect Office, Ability Office, Libre Office, WPS Office, or some other obscure software that uses the word "Office" in it's name.

rsynnott 7mo ago

> maybe don't name your product the exact same thing as the product you're replacing? "Office." They named it "Office." Surely you mean "Microsoft 365 Copilot"? (I am not making this up. That is what it is called now.) Realistically, though, I think pretty much _all_ office suites have been called [Something] Office, for about the last 30 years. The Google one ("Google Workplace", formerly "Google Apps") is the only exception I can think of, and I wouldn't necessarily take Google's lead in software branding (honestly, until I looked it up for this post, I thought it was still called Google Apps, and I use the damn thing every day).

SllX 7mo ago
Well iWork too. Before that, AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, but yeah, there's things like OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/LibreOffice/NeoOffice which are pretty much all the same lineage (StarOffice and its derivatives). Zoho's is Zoho Office Suite, which at least adds an extra word.
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  "Work/Works" tended to be used for specifically integrated office suites (AppleWorks/ClarisWorks, and then Microsoft Works). Though iWork is _not_ one, granted. I think integrated office suites have now entirely died out.
  - SllX 7mo ago
    Isn't LibreOffice still an integrated office suite like OpenOffice.org was? I never bothered installing it, so I'm genuinely asking about that one. But Google Workspace would probably count as a fully integrated suite.
    - Maken 7mo ago
      LibreOffice is like Office a collection of intercompatible apps. Microsoft Works was a single application offering Word/Excel/Outlook-like functionality.

Topfi 7mo ago

In fairness, Office is as generic a term as one can come up with for such a software suite. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if that fell under Genericide like Lego or Google and, lest we forget, the Microsoft Office brand does not exist anymore, it is 365 and Copilot now...

F7F7F7 7mo ago

That word is not as loaded as you might think it is anymore. At least not with the next generation of users. With your average 18-24 year old swimming in Google Docs, Notion, Monday, Airtable and a dozen others..."Office" will belong to the EU in no time.

dlcarrier 7mo ago

What I get out of that pitch is "use us because we're local to you, and possibly because you're required to, not because we're and good, or that we'll even try". I mostly interact with smaller contributors to their field, and they tend to be unique and bold, because that's what is needed to be competitive. When they get their uniqueness and boldness out of just being who they are, it doesn't tend to foster the type of uniqueness and boldness needed to make a good product.

rsynnott 7mo ago
In the current climate, using MS Office is a business risk for European companies. Who knows what idea will pop into ol' minihands' head next time he has a bad day at the golf course? Like, it would _not_ be particularly shocking if at some point in the next 2.5 years he attempts to interfere with the ability of US companies to sell services to Europe. You can no longer depend on "but that would be an obviously terrible idea, so they won't do it" as an operating principle; see the tariffs. Frankly, right now, there is a lot of money to be made in just providing safer alternatives to American cloud stuff. They don't need to be _better_, they just need to be based in a stable jurisdiction.
pjmlp 7mo ago
The way we are now, it is a liability to rely on foreign technology for anything critical, we should be back to the cold war days, were plenty of countries had their own computers, operating systems, programming languages. It is going to be pleasant? No, and it is going to take a few decades, however we cannot afford to have kill switches in the hands of foreign nations, even if their software is the best in the planet.

ewoodrich 7mo ago

Focusing on the word "Office" feels like a bit of red herring considering it's frequently used in other Microsoft Office replacements like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Something like "EuropaOffice" would have followed the historical pattern so it's specifically the lack of an additional qualifier word that's perhaps questionable, not the word "Office." But it does look like it's always called "Office.EU" in branding so maybe that's enough?

gzread 7mo ago

The product they're replacing is called Microsoft Copilot 365 :) More seriously, Office is a great word for what the software package does, and it can't be trademarked. You can have Microsoft Office, Libre Office, and Europa Office.

zitterbewegung 7mo ago

I thought of it branded not Office generically but “Office.eu” but maybe I am wrong ?

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

davnicwil 7mo ago

To be fair, one interpretation is spending innovation tokens wisely. Just piggy back off an already understood concept/brand, don't try to be too clever on the parts where innovating won't matter that much. There's a bit of an issue with the overload of 'office' in the political context, this being an EU initiative and domain but other than that I say good call.

hengheng 7mo ago

The Hackernews snark would likely be worse had they called it 'bureau'.

wolvoleo 7mo ago

Office is like the Xerox of photocopiers these days. It's no longer an enforceable trademark.

pjmlp 7mo ago

Office is just like using Xerox for copiers, Tempo for paper handkerchiefs, Excel for spredsheets, hoover for vacum cleaners,.... some names stick on the common mind.

1718627440 7mo ago

Office is a software category. Just because one competitor names things as "the car"(TM) doesn't mean you can't call your vehicle a car. Also it is (was) actually called Microsoft Office for a reason, because it is the Office software from Microsoft.