I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.
This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.
Of course, Microsoft did some of their... persuation of politicians and initially killed the project in 2017, but it seems that since 2020 it's back. I do think that LibreOffice could need some more full-time User Interface people to polish some rough edges (please none of the hackjob wanna-be UX people that ruin all modern apps by obnoxious popups), so that could be a good use of some tax money.
You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it. The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake. I've yet to meet anyone who appreciates ms office UX changes that happen every 5 years and move everything around.
> The problem with having UX people on a team is that they need to jusity their existence which they do by change for changes sake.
This can be said just about any profession working in software. The real issue is that nobody wants to accept that software can be finished especially management - because then you don’t have anything to sell.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were designers who fought tooth and nail against arbitrary changes. Surprise surprise good UX designers understand UX. But its like the developer who fights for keeping the PHP website because it works.
Sorry i just dont like treatment non-programming workers as something lesser. So many software companies are sucessfull despite having fucked up technology (by programmers). And its sucessful only because they have great design or marketing or sales team.
Software always has bugs that need to be fixed. It is never finished because it has an infinite number of ways it can go wrong. The same is not true for any of the non-software parts of software design.
If you're a software shop you should have everyone who doesn't write code on a contract and not be afraid to terminate them when the product is mature.
A software can only ever be mature for a period of time. Technology advances, work practices change, and your software should adapt to it. Imagine text editing stopped at Notepad, or image editing at Photoshop 1.
Also, your second paragraph leaks of Americanism and undoubtedly, people are happier and healthier with stable jobs.
Not only does that metaphor not hold up (is UX obsolete in your opinion?), it's absolutely false.
This is software after all - surely you're aware how throwing out the old solution and trying to build a "better" one results in a long slog of making the same mistakes the old team/product made and fixed (but could have warned you about if they were kept around).
- the first is that the office paradigm suck, no matter the specific implementation. We need to teach people about good desktop computer usage paradigms, like "hey, learn LaTeX, maybe ConTeXt not a WYSIWYG tool", "hey learn R, or Python not a spreadsheet", and that's sound nearly impossible even if (I've tried) it's not on NEW/computer virgin users;
- the second is "the rest of the world", a Public Administration must deal with Citizens, let's say in EU we have started to roll out ID card as smart-card usable also for on-line authentication BUT most users do not have a reader, so many have invented crappy solution to use a smartphone NFC support to read them while authenticate on a desktop. The result is a good idea, having a smart card to identify users, a thing we should have spread since at least 20+ years in the past, turned into a mess. Similarly we have "certified mails" where a third party certify message delivery like a postal mail delivery, but again they are implemented in messy ways and nothing is really uniform across EU states.
These are the biggest obstacles not the software per se.
> You just copy office 97 and can't go wrong with it.
Clippy had its debut in Office 97, so let's please NOT copy that one. Other than that, yeah, I agree. Anything up to and including Office 2003 really, those were all great. (Also includes one of my favorite, underrated Office Apps, InfoPath)
I fully agreee. It's similar to older versions of Visual Studio.
On the other hand, I'm annoyed by the omnipresent File, Edit, View, ... stuff in the menu bar. Even if those functions make no sense for a given application. And then I have to open several brittle layers there to reach a certain function.
I think UI research can do better. And by that I don't mean stashing everything into a hamburger menu.
* Looking at the context of what the user is doing and dynamically showing options
* Using those dynamic interactions to surface lesser-known but relevant features that were previously hidden deep in menus along with hundreds of other features
* Adding a search bar for the user to explain what they're doing or find something they know the name of
> I can remember the same or very similar news from Germany appearing every now and then for over a decade.
Yup I can remember (mainly via Slashdot) this being a thing going backwards and forwards for two decade or more. Back to the days of it being called StarOffice if I remember correctly.
Sometimes it seemed the city or state was just doing some elaborate license negotiation.
I remember using the original StarOffice to write up some consulting work that I’d done, it just have been the early 00s at the time, and I thought it was excellent - a worthy competitor to MS office of the time.
And then over time it felt more and more bloated and slow, to the point where I started to think I maybe misremembered how good it was when I’d first used it.
Is it just me? Or did it fall deeply into a hole? My recollection is that it hitched its wagon to Java for no good reason that I could see.
It was always pretty laggy. It didn’t and still doesn’t scale to any reasonable size document. The last thing I wrote in libreoffice was a technical specification around 200 pages long in 2019. It crashed regularly, wrecked the document and caused me a lot of work. I literally cut and pasted the entire thing into word, applied styles and cleaned it up over two days and had no problems with that. This made me dirty so I learned LaTeX and now use that.
I have colleagues who still use Libreoffice for study and have the same problems.
I've assembled and done editing passes (back and forth to an editor, using comments heavily) on two 200+ page novels in LibreOffice with none of those problems, so it sounds like something in your doc must have hit some specific edge cases/bugs.
Not doubting you - I find it clunky and fully believe there's bugs there too. I did most of my writing in Google Docs, but chapter by chapter both because I find it easier to keep individual chapters separate and because Google Docs certainly can't (or couldn't, anyway) handle anything approaching that size without slowing to a crawl, but it just felt better than LinreOffice for the actual writing.
You don’t have to log in with O365 and office and windows can stand entirely alone and there is no requirement to be cloud connected. It all still works offline as a classic AD setup. You have to be an enterprise customer though. I literally have one of these on my desk. This is not a problem for state level organisations unless they are throughly incompetent at infrastructure provision.
As for libreoffice I throughly dislike it compared to MS software. I have opened reproducible bugs against it in bugzilla that have been there for over a decade with no solutions. I got fed up in the end and just walked.
Saying that I dislike office packages entirely. They are a Swiss Army knife. Lots of mediocre tools in an inconvenient format but simple enough for the lowest denominator of poorly trained staff to use. We can and should do better. I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring and dedicated software to replace spreadsheets (all open source tools). The only remaining spreadsheet I have is personal finance which I can’t find a better solution for.
As for cloud we just send PDFs around and collab on GitHub so O365 is dead for us anyway.
> I managed to switch entirely over to LaTeX document authoring
I tried and found it the weirdest language (BrainFuck aside) I ever seen. Sure you can copy-paste-modify it to do something similar to what everyone does but doing anything atypical seems prohibitively hard.
I really miss a modern (first-class Unicode to begin with, also more intuitive while more rich and less verbose than HTML+CSS) human-oriented typesetting language. Perhaps it's time to invent what MarkDown is to HTML but to SVG.
> As for cloud we just send PDFs around
Can MS Office make hybrid PDFs the way LibreOffice does (embed the source document into the PDF)?
https://github.com/typst/typst looks promising, both the language and the tooling. I wonder where it will find its place in a world that is dominated by either Word or LaTex.
Well it all makes a lot of sense but you have to understand it first. That takes time. I’m typesetting stuff which has complex mathematics in it so there are no better solutions. This is the best human solution we have.
There are some workflows that you can’t do with anything else as well. For example I am doing a lot of semi hand drawn diagrams on my iPad in Goodnotes. These are exported as vector PDFs and trimmed and included in the LaTeX documents as figures. They are fully vector end to end which is a complete pain in the ass on any other package.
As for hybrid PDFs I don’t know. I am mostly interested in not shopping the source document.
A lot of the office stuff can be handled by templates that allow only editing relevant parts - there's not really a need for majority of office workers to have access (and needing to know) all the features of an Office suite.
Over two decades ago I was tasked doing a pilot with IBMs Document Connect for Lotus Notes - it was clear that it pretty much was an Alpha they've been selling us, but it was showing promise. In the end it went nowhere, probably because not too many other companies were interested in trying out a different approach at handling their documents.
Probably because it’s misrepresented every single time. The headline is “Germany is moving to X” and then you click the link and it turns out it’s a single state.
This is the equivalent of “South Dakota is ditching Microsoft”. It’s 30k users which isn’t nothing, but it is VERY different from the German federal government moving away from MS.
It will be interesting to see how long that remains true.
Management of resources is the enemy of profit for both sides in the market. Businesses lose out on money by spending time that they would be using on their core competency for managing software licenses, versions, data backups, servers, etc. And of course cloud providers lose out on you giving them more money than their cloud services cost them to deliver.
Azure now makes up the largest percentage of Microsoft's revenues. Obviously the business model scales very well. It likely scales better than Office does. Eventually the less-profitable thing starts taking up internal development resources that could be going to more profitable divisions, and that gets someone mad.
This time I almost believe them as there seems to be no alternative to LibreOffice given the changes Microsoft introduced during the recent years - forcing everyone to log-in with their Microsoft account at best, also moving from a classic desktop app to a web app. Conservative users like me and probably German state institutions consider classic desktop apps and web apps distinct tools for different tasks and don't want their desktop to depend on cloud.
It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice became much better since the time the discussion began.