My $dayjob involves lots of officework as in paperwork.
You bet your fucking ass I'm using Microsoft Office and reliant on it to a bloody fault. I literally and sincerely can't rely on LibreOffice to open and save documents in ways that everyone else would. If I use LibreOffice then at best I'll embarass myself, at worst I'll waste someone's time and either way I risk losing business for no good reason.
A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre. Nobody understands nor gives a damn about Libre in the real, professional world because the lingua franca is Industry aka Microsoft Office.
Yup, anyone who suggests LibreOffice (or some other alternative suite) as a sufficient substitute for MS Office is someone who's never actually done real-world work with external stakeholders. Practically everyone else uses MS Office, which means you must too.
I learned this first-hand when I was a grad student and had to write a technical report to submit to our government funders (using their required MS Office templates and all). I used LibreOffice and saved it as DOCX and everything looked great. Then my advisor opened it on his computer running MS Office and asked me WTF was up with all the mangled formatting.
> A Microsoft 365 subscription (or even buying an Office 2024 license) is chump change because I know I am speaking Industry, not Libre.
The subscription fee is only part of the cost though. Another cost is that if Office works in a certain way that causes you problems your only choice is to adapt your workflow (or more likely, live with those problems).
But corporate computing is also suffering from the deteriorating user experience.
I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.
The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.
