This article by iA addresses an important issue for Europe and for many knowledge workers. The critique of Microsoft Office has merit. However, the article is heavy on diagnosis and feather light on remedy. Many things remain unaddressed. For instance, the article does not consider how plain text editors such as iA Writer or a plain text application such as iA Presenter could serve as feasible alternatives. Can you imagine trying to train and convince an entire workforce to adopt plain text for their documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, if such a thing is even possible? Plain text is not capable of producing much of what formal professional documents require. Perhaps someday AI will replace traditional office applications, but not today. Plain text never will.
Nevertheless, in an ideal world, which never exists, we could accomplish all our knowledge work with non-proprietary applications. We are not there, and I do not see us getting there for a very long time, if ever.
The link does notwork for the original article but
I would argue that anyone can totally replace all of Microsoft Office with Libre Office and gain improvements in date handling and with all of the same formatting tools.
Generic offices of course are Office first, and there are certain industries that run on parts of it (e.g. publishing and .doc/.docx files, to my chagrin). Massive change in the greater tech world, however, might make those aspects moot eventually. Whether that is fallout from AI, authoritarianism, security risks, or a combination thereof remains to be seen.
I will say I would pay handsomely for a real-world computer with the Severance form factor shown.
I actually think MS Office is value for money for what you get. Excel alone is well worth it. If youāre on windows it even includes a database. I find it a far better ROI than Creator Studio and Adobe. The subscription includes all the apps on all the platforms. I donāt think the negative slant against office is warranted.
This is a serious issue, Iād say - businesses here in the Nordics are pretty well locked into the O365 ecosystem. The switching cost will be considerable.
Depending on use case, I think there are plenty of cases where plain-text (as in Markdown) can replace Word today. Documentation for internal systems and processes are, IMHO, much better expressed in Wiki-type repositories. We get quick search, easy to update/maintain content and expressive-enough-text for the job at hand. We live in the browser all day long, I find having to open a Word-doc is a real pain. Thing is, most Word documents are not professionally formatted or properly edited. Many are āfill-in-the-formā type of badly designed templates, others are copy/paste jobs from multiple sources (with āretain formattingā active). The core function of Word has always been as a tool for producing printed documents, not consuming the text on screens of different sizes. It is a poor tool for knowledge work where managing information needs to be easily accessible and editable.
Now, Excel on the other handā¦ that is so heavily ingrained in workflows that I imagine people will have a real hard time letting it go. The strenght of Excel is that is can accomodate a wild range of purposes, and it actually works pretty well for most of them. This will be true for any spreadsheet product of courseā¦
However, I have used Microsoftās Office products since their initial release. Many have never used anything else, and resistance to change is working in favor of Microsoft here. Even the young people on my teams have no idea about how to maintain a wiki or use Markdown. People are totally incurious about learning to use O365 in a better way too. Telling them to update a wiki using Markdown will beā¦ letās say āa challengeā.
After 30+ years, I reluctantly tolerate the MS Office suite, but hate the fact that there is no evidence of UX-work being done. I canāt recall the last time a feature update improved my workday. And no, CoPilot is not helping
I initially had a negative reaction to that article, but as I thought about it, I felt they had an important point.
All tools reflect a deep set of assumptions: in the case of āofficeā tools they are arguing itās about producing print on paper, when thatās actually now a small part of the process of work. If, for many reasons, we want to move away from Microsoft Office, perhaps we should be looking not to find a new set of office tools, based on the same assumptions (like Libre Office) but thinking about what would be better ways to work and building tools to reflect that: we might end up with something much better suited to what we need to do and be more productive. If you implicitly perceive work as producing word documents, to specific formats, you might as well use word or an open source clone of it, but maybe there are other ways to achieve what you are trying to achieve without even thinking that way.
I donāt think ia have neat answers to these issues, and that they often get carried away by their own opinionated design principles, but I am glad they are trying to think outside the box and encouraging us all to do so.
I concur, and one should expect a degree of self-promotion from any company presenting its own products.
What struck me, however, was the inherent danger of European governments and organizations remaining locked into American technology. I tried to put myself in their position and ask a simple question: as an American, would I want the work of my government, my corporations, and my essential institutions dependent on European companies for critical services? The answer is no. Given recent political developments, which I will leave unspecified, if I were a European official, I would be actively seeking alternatives for reasons of national security alone.
Replacing Microsoft Office with LibreOffice is a simple solution, if you are talking about smaller companies. I had about 100 users running OpenOffice/LibraOffice for about a decade prior to my retirement, but they stored their data on local servers. Today āeveryoneā uses cloud storage and AFAIK most of it belongs to US companies. Building infrastructure takes time.
One company, the Schwarz Group has partnered with Google to āfully address the sovereignty requirements of regulated industries, including ensuring all data is secured and backed up on local soil with absolutely no opportunity for access by foreign nations or platform providers,ā
I wonder if something similar would work for companies using MS Office, at least in the near term? All this is happening while AI is disrupting everything, making planning even more difficult.
Agree! I was a diehard MS Office subscriber for many many years. Always assumed I would never change.
Two years ago, after a minor annoyance with MS Tech support, I realized I didnāt need Outlook because I had moved off MS Exchange to Fast MaiI.
I hadnāt formatted a resume or printed a paper document in Word in over 5 years, I hadnāt touched PowerPower or Macās Keynote for eons.
The only tool i still use is MS Excel for straightforward personal, financial, and planning spreadsheets.
For me, LibreOffice provided the 90%+ direct equivalent to Excel that I was comfortable switching and the other LibreOffice apps were there as a fallback, should i need to open/convert existing documents (and Appleās apps are ok in a pinch too).
Although I was paying the subscription for MS Office, I switched to LibreOffice not because of the cost but to simplify my workflow/computing life.
Your argument is inverted. First determine where plain text is truly a perfectly viable alternative to formatted text. Then argue for tools.
We already do not lack for our own abilities to munge the formatting of documents and presentations to unlimited extremes, let alone that we should argue to bring a potentially proprietary AI tool in to the mix, let alone that we also already expect AI tools to train based on the most common (read flashiest) existing formats. Without proper, commensurate front-end training, and without setting firm, disciplined standards on what are best formats, we will find that AI tools, when embedded in (not replacing) ātraditionalā office applications, will simply make our most commonly-bad document formatting even more common. And no one will then know what to do about it. If anyone who cares is left or can get enough traction to be heard.
One of the carpenters who is doing work at my house is using a well designed, nicely balanced, battery powered, hand-held pneumatic nail gun that he bought from a well-respected vendor (read ā it is a proprietary product). Essentially, by analogy, you are suggesting in this ideal world that he should be able to get this same quality craftsmanship and utility in a knock-off, non-proprietary nail gun.
Why should āknowledge workā be an exception to the practical framework that āyou get what you pay forā in the quality of the tools that you decide to use to create things, and that sometimes that quality is locked in for its own self-preservation?
Alternatively, if Europe and the like want to move away from using the āproprietaryā MS Office, what claim would you have in this practical world that they must be excluded from developing their own tool with its own proprietary format?
ps ā I do not argue that proprietary tools come without any associated dangers, e.g. of being locked in to the technology that someone else controls. I argue that we cannot argue for an exception in āknowledge workā to never have to face the practical case of using proprietary tools.
I think for almost all purposes itās not about whether something is proprietary or open thatās the key issue, but whether the commercial relationship you have with the vendor is fair or exploitative. Itās a fact of life that you tend to get what you pay for, and most of us are willing to pay for sufficient quality, reliability and convenience for the itemās purpose, but vendors are becoming increasingly skilled at making us pay more, for longer, than we want to. One of the main ways of doing that is to remove our power as consumers so that we have to use a product in exactly the way that the manufacturer wants us to, having to buy supplies, services and subscriptions in order to keep using the tool, with no alternatives available.
The ultimate loss of power is when control of those supplies, services etc. is beyond the control not just of the consumer but of your government and even law. In Europe weāre in a scramble where governments are just realising how exposed they allowed their economies to become.
Personally, I dropped MS Office years ago for a mix of plain text and the iWork suite. That solves my professional and personal needs. Iāve looked briefly at LibreOffice, and while it seems perfectly functional, itās not what I would choose.
However, Iām fully supportive of the Europeans building out their own āEuro Stackā to replace American tech. It makes sense for their governments, and the big tech companies need competition.
I think I read IAās article for what it was, promotion of their own products. Unfortunately I doubt theyāll make much headway there, my experience in professional workplace environments most likely mirrors most of the folks in this forum. Itās nearly impossible to convince your average office worker to use anything other than Word for typing text. I had a running joke for a while about āitās now been 0 days since someone emailed me a Word document containing nothing but textā.
I agree financially, M365 is outstanding value for
Money at all of its levels.
More and more organisations are looking to move away from systems provided by American corporations. The current administration has done a significant amount of damage to the previously largely unquestioned trust other parts of the world, especially NATO allies, had in the USA. (this is not political, itās a fact)
As someone who regularly engaged with between 70 and 120 questionnaires a year for the last 5 years from global customers, it was only in March last year that we started getting questions about our reliance on American organisations, and mid 2025 when this was first given as a reason to deselect us as a potential supplier.
Yes, and I understand why. But, AFAIK, EU owned companies have about 15% of the cloud market. Is that enough to support every business that wants to migrate away from US companies?
In the late 90ās my employer started plans to adopt Microsoft Active Directory for all our offices and factories in the world. We only had around 65,000 employees, didnāt have to build any data centers, and it took about two years.
The move to a fully EU only approach will likely take many years. I thought a hybrid approach sounded like it could allow data security in the meantime.
Many places whoāve moved to a cloud first strategy and are heavily embedded no longer have the skills in house to host on-prem. Iād also say that because so few people have moved in that direction thereās very little publicly known protocol to lean on.
I canāt imagine with many organisations having data centres across the globe that it should be such an issue?
The bigger issue I would have thought is whether the government where the head office resides can compel the organisation to hand over data not on their soil?
Amazon are everywhere and provide storage for many businesses. The question is whether Amazon US can be compelled to give data to the US government that resides in the EU?
