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Reminds me of large government departments where some idiot in the IT architecture team says: "Woah there buddy! Why do you think it's safe to assume that Microsoft Office is what we're going to use? What if we decide to use Open Office?"

That's maybe one or two words away from a literal conversation in a huge meeting with dozens of high-level IT staff overseeing an org with 30K staff and a petabyte of existing Microsoft Office documents.

Boggles the mind that some people think this way, but they do.

Like... imagine an electrician wiring a new office building having a debate about which frequency and voltage to use. "Don't make assumptions!"



Pretty amazing that some people still believe that choice exists rather than submitting to the monopoly. That's a petabyte of files locked into a proprietary format. The smart thing to do is bow down to the monopoly. Only an idiot would try to shift the balance of power back to the users.

Imagine what wiring an office building would be like if all the wires, circuit breakers and tools could only be bought from a single vendor. Boggles the mind.


There have been tons of innovation in the field of electrical engineering since the standard voltages and frequencies were fixed. New installations are made to a better standard than older ones, while still maintaining interoperability. They don't blindly stick to the status quo without ever questioning if there's a more cost-efficient option like big-corp IT departments tend to do.


So if you were building a 40-storey high rise office building and the sparky you hired decided to install electrical outlets that were all 400 Volts and 30 Hz, you'd be fine with that?

"Why stick to the status quo?"


I think a better analogy would if the sparky decided to use a new type of wire with better conduction than standard copper.

As GP comment said, there has been innovation in the electrical engineering space that maintains backward compatibility.

So if Open/LibreOffice could actual deal well with MS Office formats, for example, whilst removing the annoying bits (cost, telemetery, UI[0]), then yes, it might be wise to move on from the status quo.

[0] in practice I don't think the OpenOffice UI is better than the MS Office, but in theory some people could prefer it


I have worked at Fortune 500 companies that use the Google Suite products. Microsoft Office is not the only option in this space.


Just because you didn't see office doesn't mean it's not there running some backend processes. Excel is embedded everywhere in Fortune 500 companies.


Yes, some people used Excel (finance). My point is it is not inconceivable to use something other than Microsoft Office.


In my department, we only use LaTeX

(but it is in academia)




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