[HN Gopher] Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Ne...
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Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud
Author : buyucu
Score : 380 points
Date : 2025-10-28 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.itsfoss.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.itsfoss.com)
| gostsamo wrote:
| Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos
| helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be
| more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud
| providers.
| munchlax wrote:
| Of course! Sell the disease and the cure.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Actually, they lost a lot from the clouds providing managed
| services out of a box. Maybe they got some money from
| migrations, but this is not where the juice is.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with
| Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look
| like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with
| others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can
| self-host.
| weightedreply wrote:
| I host a small server for family and it seems to work well:
|
| https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/
| ale42 wrote:
| Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with
| the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent
| performance (for just 3-4 users)?
| bobim wrote:
| I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and
| upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years
| ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I
| succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but
| it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than
| what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that
| you have to accept some level of unreliability.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web,
| and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer
| for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?
| bogwog wrote:
| Nextcloud editors use Collabora Online, which is apparently a
| fork/derivative of LibreOffice:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online
| esperent wrote:
| As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc,
| so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get
| used to it.
|
| My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good
| enough. However it's much better than the web version of
| excel.
|
| Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to
| run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak
| hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in
| particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.
| harha wrote:
| I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in
| the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to
| reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes
| 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint
| AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than
| specifying with who to specifically).
| saubeidl wrote:
| I'm not sure about Nextcloud, but the French government built a
| thing that looks pretty good:
| https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/
|
| If you want a full suite, the German government has been
| working on integrating and packaging a whole open source
| productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en
| mschild wrote:
| I applaud both efforts but openDesk is mainly aimed at
| governments and usually only implements 3rd party OSS.
|
| Their file storage solution is Nextcloud, chat is element,
| etc.
| troyvit wrote:
| I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My
| nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently.
| It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or
| UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems
| relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a
| pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own.
| I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I
| was looking for.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| The current Google workspace service is about $7 a month. I'd
| pay more to be rid of AI, it's a near-constant nuisance, and
| major privacy concern. But $18 seems steep to also be missing
| core features.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| $7 per user. So if you have three people using the server,
| it becomes cheaper.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Hetzner offer managed next cloud for 5 euro with 1tb storage.
| 13 euro for 5tb.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I started using this and overall quite good but with very
| minor caveats...
|
| * My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where
| this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little
| latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.
|
| * While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is
| included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever
| the online office suite is called) is not included and you
| would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in
| their relevant knowledge base webpages.
| zenmac wrote:
| >Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want
| out of any alternatives that I can self-host.
|
| CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.
| bogwog wrote:
| Why?
| dfedbeef wrote:
| It has crypt in the name
| Jaxan wrote:
| CryptPad uses end-to-end encryption for all documents. It
| has a very different use case than other collaborative
| office suites. You can of course still use it as a
| replacement, but in my experience opening documents takes
| a bit of time.
| odo1242 wrote:
| You can run Libreoffice on Nextcloud with online editing, such
| that two people can open a file and edit it at the same time.
| timeon wrote:
| On the other hand, not depending on trans-ocean entity is
| feature Google Docs can't offer. And that one is high priority
| these days.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| https://nextcloud.com/office/ seems to be exactly that.
|
| Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up
| collabora, click the integration button"
| https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/
|
| Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name
| nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80
| --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume
| nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume
| /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-
| releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions:
| https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one
| rahkiin wrote:
| That's not very secure, giving a :latest container access to
| the docker socket...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Collaborative editing is very niche, and I highly doubt it's
| used in government work.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Very niche? That depends a lot on the culture (I use that
| daily).
| g8oz wrote:
| >Collaborative editing is very niche
|
| I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and
| private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day
| consists of collaboratively editing documents and
| spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a
| sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this
| up? Thx".
| infp_arborist wrote:
| With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically)
| current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why
| are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions
| will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years?
| Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity,
| and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with
| Atos".
|
| I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for
| national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or
| UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT
| related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies
| like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption
| and cronyism, things Austrian politicians are well versed in.
|
| This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable
| skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely
| lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
|
| Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who
| care more about the state of their nation than just making a
| quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT
| services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their
| nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are
| incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders
| without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of
| their iron clad government contracts with little accountability
| which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people
| in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those
| consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate
| this revolving door to the gravy train.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Correct title would be Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft
| with Atos.
|
| From the article:
|
| > The implementation was carried out in partnership with Atos
| Austria, which worked alongside Nextcloud's team to ensure the
| platform met the ministry's legal, technical, and
| organizational requirements.
|
| So yes, while Atos seems to have been the contractor (?), the
| end result is that the title is correct, they've replaced
| whatever they used Microsoft for, with NextCloud, the process
| which was executed by Atos.
|
| That's how I understood it from the article at least. And I'm
| guessing more people are likely to have heard about NextCloud
| before while probably not heard about Atos before, unless
| you're Austrian. So for a web article, it makes sense to
| highlight what people might understand and recognize.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> And I'm guessing more people are likely to have heard
| about NextCloud before while probably not heard about Atos
| before, unless you're Austrian_
|
| You don't need to be Austrian for that. Atos is a pretty
| infamous IT services provider that operates in all of Europe
| and has the same issues as all such service providers like
| Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, IBM, NTT Data, etc,
| and so far I haven't see ONE SINGLE CASE where these clowns
| were involved in a government project and it didn't turn out
| to be an expensive, over-budget, delayed, shitshow leaving
| the taxpayers holding the bag.
|
| Like for example Austria has a national highway
| company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB) where the
| government is majority shareholder and they work pretty damn
| good to serve the taxpayers and the users of those services
| whether they're Austrians or not.
|
| So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure instead
| of outsourcing it to all these parasites? It's 2025, when do
| we start treating IT infrastructure like road, rail, water,
| energy, healthcare etc already? How many decades more need to
| pass till the government realizes that the internet and
| associated services are also worthy of national importance
| and therefore ownership?
|
| I'm not saying to nationalize the internet, on the contrary
| privatization and decentralization is better for consumers,
| but the digital interaction between taxpayer and government
| is something that should not be outsourced to the private
| sector, especially not to foreign publicly treaded companies
| like Atos, who have no skin in the local game and don't give
| a fuck if they leave an expensive mess behind as long as they
| can ride the gravy train while it lasts.
|
| So excuse me if I have a high degree of skepticism when I
| hear about the involvement of the likes of Atos in taxpayer
| funded projects.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| So much this. It's absurd that in a world where every
| government interaction isoving online, we still ask every
| individual state institution to contract out the
| development and maintenance work to outside companies,
| instead of having a government IT provider.
|
| The savings on bureaucracy and time spent analyzing puvlic
| offers alone would be immense over a decade.
| atonse wrote:
| At least in the US we started solving this by having high
| salaries for tech workers in government (see 18f and
| USDS, etc, both shut down by Trump), or UK's GDS which
| was a pioneer in this space.
|
| If you want to attract good talent, there are successful
| models out there now, but you have to start by paying
| them way more than the average government salary. But the
| contractors throw lobbying money at these things and try
| to stop them every step of the way.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| I disagree. Unlike the US, tech salaries in Austrian
| private sector are not terribly amazing to begin with, so
| the Austrian government would have no issues to find
| labor within the budget that they gave Atos, not to
| mention that government workers in Austria have other
| perks that workers in the private sector don't have, like
| harder to fire, having their own private kindergartens
| for the workers' kids, much better pension funds and
| health insurance funds with more coverage and less
| waiting times, public housing, etc that to a lot of
| people will have more value than a higher paycheque in
| the private sector.
|
| So IT IS technically possible to gather the labor force
| to build the project in house, it just isn't much
| political motivation to do so when you have lobbyists
| swaying leaders in the other direction, and the
| investigative journalists and voters are too tech
| illiterate to understand this type of grift because when
| the government pays a billion Euros for a bridge or a
| tunnel and after 10 years the bridge or tunnel is not
| there, everyone notices and someone needs to go to jail
| or at least loose their job in politics for that obvious
| theft.
|
| But if you spend a billion to consultancies on a
| government IT project, and it's an offshored clusterfuck
| that barely works and could have been done better by a
| local shop for 1/100 of the cost, then the journalists
| and taxpayers have no clue they've been robbed blind
| because nobody understands the nitty gritty and costs of
| SW development, and unlike bridges and tunnels, the
| public can't see the source code in the open as they walk
| to school to see that there's nothing there, which is why
| government IT projects has now become the best and
| easiest way to funnel taxpayer money into private
| pockets.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The problem isn't that governments can't hire
| programmers. It's that they refuse to hire programmers,
| and prefer to pay the same consultancies for the same
| programs over and over again.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think from an efficiency standpoint it makes sense to
| contract out to bigger players. Economies of scale are
| huge in software and IT since once it's written copying
| and running code is basically free.
|
| The problem of course is that using someone else's
| proprietary, closed-source code makes you beholden to
| them. That's a problem for consumers but it's an even
| bigger problem for sovereign nations. Would be a great
| outcome if greater awareness of this problem lead to more
| state resources being invested in open source
| alternatives to proprietary software.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> Economies of scale are huge in software and IT since
| once it's written copying and running code is basically
| free._
|
| If that were true, then all these government IT projects
| from these infamous consultancies would all come in-time
| and under budget, but that's never the case, because
| every government wants things completely different than
| the other government, so it's never a just a copy-paste,
| fire-and-forget type of job.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| oh it very much is. they just act and bill like it's not.
|
| corruption requires costs you cannot verify after
| delivery. for construction it's the exagerated foundation
| which they only actually deliver what's needed and pocket
| the difference. for software it is the hundreds of
| rewrites that may or may not have happened and are now in
| the past.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > corruption requires costs you cannot verify after
| delivery.
|
| No, that is plain fraud. Corruption is paying so that no
| one notices or cares about the the costs that can't be
| justified after delivery.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| On time and under budget is relative to what you set the
| budget and deadlines to in the first place. If these
| companies had to rewrite Excel from scratch for every
| client I guarantee you the budgeted cost would be a lot
| higher (and they'd probably still go over that figure).
| harvey9 wrote:
| Nobody suggested rewriting Excel or even customising
| libre office. These projects are often ERPs which get
| customised to the client's requirements. Chaos and
| ballooning costs often follow for all the usual reasons.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| My point is "completely different than the other
| government" is only true to an extent. Even with
| significant customization, there's still a lot shared
| which benefits immensely from economies of scale. As you
| said, nobody's rewriting Excel.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The economies of scale would work exactly the other way
| than you think. Right now, the same company can sell the
| same solution for the same money to 20 government
| agencies, ones that have broadly similar needs, because
| it costs too much for anyone else to compete with them.
| The company then extracts massive profit from every
| subsequent project, with none of the savings going to the
| government. And even if a new player wins some of the
| contracts, they have to start from scratch and thus need
| to charge similar prices.
|
| If there was a government IT office, it could build this
| in house, and after the initial investment in building
| the base infra, re-use it almost for free in every
| government agency in the same country. In the context of
| the EU, they could even make moves to share this code
| with other governments, passing on the savings there as
| well.
| mk89 wrote:
| I prefer Atos + a solid open source solution to "an own IT
| department that will ditch the battle tested open source
| solution because XYZ" and then 6 months later bugs rain
| from the sky with users' data searchable in google.
|
| Opening up a whole department requires skills. If you don't
| have such skills, please hire the "parasite". I prefer
| that. At least they provide a service, overpaid, ok, but
| they have at least some knowledge in the business.
| jack_tripper wrote:
| _> overpaid, ok, but they have at least some knowledge in
| the business._
|
| With all due respect, setting up a Nextcloud instance for
| a government entity is not really rocket science
| requiring a 150 IQ, Stanford grad, PhD, galaxy-brain
| labor force, but it's a skill that's easily abundant in
| Austrian and can be easily transferred to more of the
| tech labor pool to achieve the same results of what Atos
| did.
|
| We're talking about a Nextcloud instance here, not
| building an entire hyperscaler from scratch, like AWS or
| Equinix, which is indeed a skill next to inexistent in
| most of Europe, which does indeed require contracting
| FAANG corps to build because we lack that capability in
| Europe.
| mk89 wrote:
| I am not talking about the Austrian people's skills ;) I
| bet the employees from Atos were locals, so...
|
| I am talking about politicians that are supposed to
| create the conditions to set this up in a proper, honest
| and "good" way. As soon as this becomes a "department",
| nextcloud is not an option because it lacks xyz.
|
| So let's reimplement it _worse_. All this to justify the
| need for having an IT department at all.
|
| This is why sometimes I prefer that they just hire some
| company and that's it. One and done. (More or less).
|
| Also, on a more disturbing note: how do you reduce the
| costs, when you have public employees....? You can't fire
| them, or it's nearly impossible to do so. Atos, on the
| other hand, you can switch.
| franga2000 wrote:
| But this is the exact issue you have with IT outsourcing
| - instead of taking the obvious and sustainable solution,
| there's a clause somewhere in the 500 page requirements
| doc that doesn't even make any sense, but means you have
| to use something nonstandard and even add some of your
| own hacks on top. Because it's a tender, you can't really
| change the spec and you don't care to either, because a
| terrible bodge means they have to go back to you whenever
| it needs changes/fixes.
|
| An in-house development department on the other hand
| doesn't have to stick to the strictly disconnected way of
| tenders and the development team can actually work with
| the stakeholders to develop and evolve the spec
| throughout the project. They also don't need to guarantee
| future business for themselves through vendor lock-in or
| boost their corporate partners through technology
| choices.
|
| This is an unprecedented case where a private company
| decided to go the open source route for a government
| project, usually it's only the in-house teams that pick
| open source.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Like for example Austria has a national highway
| company(ASFINAG) and national railway company(OEBB)
|
| Since only the government is doing these, there is no real
| gain from outsourcing - either way you pay the full costs
| (it need not be that way, but that is how it typically is).
| For IT lots of others also need that work and so you can
| share the overhead costs if you outsource.
| woodson wrote:
| > So then why not have the same for IT infrastructure
| instead of outsourcing it to all these parasites?
|
| That exists already (and has for a long while): the
| Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ, https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They
| do a lot of public facing government websites and portals.
| If you lived in Austria, there's a good chance that you've
| used at least one of them. The question is, why haven't
| they been tasked with this migration?
| atonse wrote:
| It means absolutely nothing that they "worked alongside
| Nextcloud's team" - I worked with a big household consulting
| firm (who will remain nameless), for a common client who
| adopted Qualtrics. The firm was a Platinum Qualtrics partner
| (or whatever the highest tier was).
|
| I had never used Qualtrics, and I had to help the team figure
| out all kinds of basic things on how to actually configure
| Qualtrics. And they (on paper) were the experts supposedly.
| Even our common client was a bit amused about the whole
| thing.
|
| It was my first experience seeing how these big firms
| operate. At the end of the day, some poor 28 year old at Atos
| (or probably outsourced to another country) who spent a few
| days getting some Nextcloud certification is probably doing a
| lot of the work, rather than thinking you're getting the best
| of the best who know this stuff inside out.
|
| Let's see how it goes. At the end of the day, I (like most
| people) want more competition in this space. If more people
| use LibreOffice, hopefully that results in more investment in
| the product. So I hope for positive outcomes.
| prmoustache wrote:
| That's the thing with these service companies, they only
| hire when they get the contracts, so you can rarely expect
| engineers skilled and experienced with a product so many of
| them got introduced a few days/weeks before.
|
| They usually merely serve as gatekeepers to the vendor
| support.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Atos is a gigantic French company. Fully Austrian companies
| like Noctua or Proxmox aren't even that famous within
| Austria, why would the average citizen here know about a
| French IT company?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Microsoft isn't a product or service. Nextcloud is. They
| either replaced Microsoft with Atos, or they replaced
| Office365 with Nextcloud.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| I'm 100% confident and Microsoft installation would also have
| required working with a local reseller/contractor.
|
| It would probably have been ATOS itself.
| woodson wrote:
| > I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for
| national products/websites
|
| It (kinda) does: the Bundesrechenzentrum (BRZ,
| https://www.brz.gv.at/en/). They do a lot of public facing
| government websites and portals. If you lived in Austria,
| there's a good chance that you've used at least one of them.
| rcbdev wrote:
| ...and the BRZ doesn't outsource most stuff? Just like the
| Magistrate's Dept. 1 (Vienna Digital) for state-level IT in
| the federal capitol? Or IT-Kommunal for municipal IT all over
| Austria?
|
| As far as I'm concerned, all of these public sector ICT
| divisions are just a pile of contracts.
| woodson wrote:
| Yes of course. From the outside, I can't tell to what
| extent and whether it's being done sensibly, but there are
| projects where they are likely better off contracting them
| out, and others where there are benefits of keeping things
| in-house (e.g., involving subject matter experts with long
| involvement in some niche government area). My point was
| that such an organization already exists.
| rcbdev wrote:
| At the time of writing, the BRZ has spent over 2.1
| billion euros in public procurement contracts above the
| award threshhold. [1] This is not accounting for
| personell costs of their 1800 in-house employees.
|
| [1] https://offenevergaben.at/auftraggeber/8983
| harvey9 wrote:
| True the UK has some decent government websites, but those were
| against a wider trend of huge government spending on all the
| well-known big tech firms.
| hex-m wrote:
| The dependency is much weaker in this case. Finding somebody
| else to manage/host Nextcloud is easy while using MS Office
| without Microsoft is impossible.
| nasmorn wrote:
| Frank Stronach needs to lead a Hundertschaft unternehmerischer
| nachhaltiger Digitalisierung.
| delusional wrote:
| > high quality ones Denmark
|
| That's fun to hear somebody say on the internet. The consensus
| amongst my peers here in Denmark seems to be that we also
| outsource most of our public software to Accenture, NetCompany,
| and KMD. Two of these are admittedly Danish consultancy
| companies, but they are private consultancies.
| constantcrying wrote:
| Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are
| "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds
| of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they
| all need to be torn out and replaced.
|
| >As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk
| analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the
| ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR
| compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
|
| This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really
| doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I don't mind the reason being "the right reason" or not,
| getting rid of Microsoft will be a net-positive regardless.
|
| And it's a process that will take years, and be step-by-step,
| you can't just "torn out and replace everything" in one go, not
| to mention how bad of an idea that would be regardless.
|
| I'm happy we continue to do this step by step, making sure it's
| working alright and is the right thing along the way.
| criticalfault wrote:
| All this money saved should be "unsaved" until a decent
| alternative is made. Everything that the government should
| spent here, should be invested into pan-european organization
| to develop a new office suite.
|
| Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft is
| so dominant. Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful,
| is one of the worst desktop applications to use.
|
| Everyone I proposed this to tried it and said that its horrible
| and they don't want to use it. And I agree with them: because
| libre office is so sh*t, u use Google docs.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| > Libre office in my opinion is one of the reasons Microsoft
| is so dominant.
|
| Microsoft Office was already dominant long before LibreOffice
| started. Hell, MSO was already dominant when StarOffice was
| renamed OpenOffice.org, long before LibreOffice was a thought
| in anyone's mind.
|
| > Unfortunately, libre office, even though useful, is one of
| the worst desktop applications to use.
|
| You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office. Ask
| anyone who's more well versed in Google Workspace and they'll
| tell you that MS is difficult to use.
| criticalfault wrote:
| Yes Microsoft Office was already dominant. Why didn't libre
| office affect this dominance being 'so good'? It's also
| free, so it should be interesting to companies, right?
| Wrong. I recently set up an SME who when saw it ran away
| and immediately bought a Microsoft license, which means
| they would rather pay and be spied on than use libre
| office.
|
| Believe it or not, people like nice things. Microsoft
| Office looks nice. Libre office looks like a car accident.
| It's shallow, I know, but this is the response I get every
| time.
|
| Everyone I know hates it. It is a small sample, true, but
| it says something. So I think, the fact Microsoft is so
| strong is to be blamed on the alternatives, or in this case
| only one alternative.
|
| We need to look at this as
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
|
| Turn it around. If it would be good, people would jump on
| it. Especially small companies.
|
| Google workspace is a web app, no? So it being better than
| desktop is comparing different things. I use it and I like
| it, especially since I don't need advanced Features
| Microsoft offers
|
| We have no _good_ alternative. We have _an_ alternative.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Google workspace is a web app, no?
|
| American company, no alternative at all.
|
| Microsoft products are web apps as well.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If your criteria for a good alternative is people like it
| the very first time they see it, you'll never find a good
| alternative.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > You only feel this way because you're used to MS Office.
|
| You are kind of proving the point. You point to a Google
| product as a good alternative, not to the OSS product. I
| really want to like LibreOffice and it is a good product
| for what it is, but it is far from being a great product.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Libreoffice is fine, better than we deserve. If they want it
| to be even better, maybe instead of throwing a few hundred
| million at MS, they could throw a few hundred million at
| Libreoffice. It's old as hell and kept up by charity.
|
| The idea that Libreoffice is so bad that giving up your
| freedom to Google or Microsoft is unavoidable just shows your
| actual level of objection to being slaves to US companies is
| close to zero. You'll only be pried away from your dependence
| on the latest popular versions of US products kicking,
| screaming, and complaining the entire time. You wouldn't be
| satisfied with anything but a clone, and you'd complain that
| the clone lacked the most obscure features of the _real
| thing._
|
| And it's not just you, but a typical sort of aimless ridicule
| of FOSS product from people who feel guilty about not using
| them when their professed politics say they should. You'll
| talk a big game about independence, but your fictional pan-
| European office suite is far worse than Libreoffice, seeing
| as it doesn't exist. Couldn't be more feature-light.
| criticalfault wrote:
| I disagree completely. If libre office would be fine, it
| would be popular. And, as said, most of the people I know
| avoid it like a plague.
|
| Also, im not trying to ridicule FOSS as a whole. if
| anything I'm a financial supporter for several projects and
| organizations. It's not a lot of money, but it's every
| month. So, no, it's not this.
|
| The proposal would be to fund something like collabora,
| build on top of libre office or do something greenfield,
| but all this money that was supposed to go to Microsoft
| should be redirected.
|
| Decision that governments did are not based on the fact
| that libre office is good. It's based on 1) political
| reasons called digital sovereignty and 2) price. Maybe 3)
| being pissed at trump. They didn't do it because LO was
| good.
|
| Some american products have no good alternatives, yet. Some
| do, like windows can be replaced with gnome, but mobile
| phones cannot. Probably you are not typing or reading this
| from a European os on your phone, yet alternatives exist.
| Just not good ones.
|
| Microsoft Office clone is not what I want, but what I would
| accept. Let's say UI should be very similar to Microsoft
| Office or even better Google office. That's it. Make it in
| a desktop suite and we are all good.
|
| But do not ignore the UI part of the app.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Calling NIS2 'upcoming' legislation at this point is as funny
| as it is sad.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Great to see how Open-source alternatives have matured enough
| that even governments are pushing to use them!
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Looks like training the users ahead of time led to a faster
| migration with fewer problems.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Mom hates teams, and wants skype back.
| zkmon wrote:
| MS Office and other MS Products are unnecessary bloat of features
| and luxury that are dumped on customer only to keep the
| competition away. MS is YAGNI.
| t_mann wrote:
| Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365,
| Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar
| stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way
| to go!
|
| [0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-
| off...
|
| [1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-
| source...
| chris_wot wrote:
| I do wonder whether a lot of Europe is starting to decouple
| from U.S. tech.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Nextcloud is great, easy self-hosting, lots of features.
| kburman wrote:
| I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my
| experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal
| self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government
| setup.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I think it also depend if you only use it to sync and share
| files or if you want to use the included web apps.
|
| But to be honest office 365 also struggle at times when using
| the web version of the office tools. Last week I had to do
| reporting on a small excel document with 4 sheets, the biggest
| one having less than 30 lines and 6 column and every time I had
| to insert a line it took 5 to 10 seconds for that line to
| appear and the whole excel web app was unresponsive until it
| appeared.
| nis0s wrote:
| Countries serious about work they don't want leaking should
| invest in homegrown talent, no one can be trusted.
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