>Seems to be a running trend in Germany to move toward open software.
Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.
The only reason people are used to it is because MS has spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot into pretty much every IT education of relevance.
Free student/teacher versions are just one example of that, which then leads to MS products being everywhere, and consequently MS products are what most people get taught on in most educational settings.
This doesn't just apply to Office software, it applies to whole operating systems and is what keeps the MS monopoly entrenched to this day.
> The only reason people are used to it is because MS has spend decades, and plenty of money, getting their foot into pretty much every IT education of relevance.
This is the same argument that people have used for the last 20 years of "this year is the year for Linux on the Desktop!". I don't think it was true then or now. People that use Linux consciously, or unconsciously, build/buy systems that work with Linux. I've tried many times in the past but gave up and moved to OS X after getting tired of fiddling with wifi, sleep/wake, trackpad, graphics switching, and battery life problems. If I'm going to buy a system for an OS, I might as well optimize the integration by buying an integrated system/OS. I suppose you could claim those are the fault of MS popularity, but I claim it's the result of volunteers not having financial incentive to add support for the random hardware that was in my computer.
I was used to Windows, but I'm not using Linux only because I didn't buy a system for it.
It was true back then and remains true to this day even with smartdevices taking over and slowly pushing desktops out of the educaton sector.
Anybody who grew up since the 80s and had some kind of "IT related" education in school, most likely got said education on MS systems with MS software.
In Germany having "MS office knowledge" is considered the absolute basic for any office/admin job no matter how unqualified. People expect you to know your way around Word, Excel and Powerpoint because that's the software that's taught in schools and forced occupational trainings even at the lowest levels.
At the higher levels you often gonna need a long list MS training certifications to even be considered taken seriously.
It's particularly the entrenchment in the education sector that makes it near impossible to change anything about this. People are getting "primed" on MS in school like children are getting primed into religions by their parents; There is pretty much no choice involved for them.
Edit: I don't get the downvote. Last week I spent 10 minutes of a meeting waiting for the presenter to apply some fix to his LibreOffice presentation because font kerning and sizes were corrupt in the full screen view.
I would love to ditch MS completely and use LibreOffice for all my work, but it has its weak spots.
Yeah, until the Ms sales guys wine and dine some German politicians and promise to build a new campus in $BIG_CITY that creates ## jobs, then they suddenly decide to renew their windows and office licenses instead. Rinse and repeat.