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Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

Tbh. after the recent sets of Microsoft ToS/Privacy Terms I would argue _any usage of Microsoft Windows and/or most Microsoft products_ is not legally possible in a public office handling any private or otherwise sensitive data.

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I mean they might have different ToS/Privacy Terms, but I it would still be high risk due to MS track record of "accidentally" undoing or ignoring various "I don't want to be tracked" choices.

Like tbh. from a privacy POV MS has become a joke, I mean how hard do you have to mess up that google is preferable bay a not so small margin.

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I wonder how with such a big market alternatives have never become popular

Is it too much to hope for a Blender-like foundation to run an open source project that is actually competitive?

The risk of not being compatible with XYZ Word/Excel/Powerpoint feature is too great. Do you really want your employees to not be able to open the client's document because you cheaped out on your productivity suite? Or, conversely, your prospective customer to not be able to open your proposal because of the same?

Alternatives did exist, who remembers Lotus Notes, Word Perfect, Open Office, Apple Pages, ..., but to use them today would be akin to deploying a new fangled AI web app as a Flash application.

The other thing to mention is that the Microsoft products are really pretty good and for most businesses really pretty cheap.

You can get a 365 licence (Teams, OneDrive/Sharepoint, Powerpoint, Excel, Word, Outlook & hosted exchange) for $12.50/month.

It's only really Google that's competing at this price point (Broadly both their 'standard' packages are approx. the same price).

Plus I've not come across a product that's better than being Excel than Excel is (and your analyst and finance teams will hate you if you take Excel away!).

I don't think that's wild.

But IMO the real moat in M365 is that it also bundles Microsoft Entra ID (formerly AAD) licenses and it's strongly integrated to it + SharePoint.

This way you can have "basic IT stuff" you expect in a company like company users, groups, shared folders, file permissions, etc...

I mean https://www.collaboraoffice.com/collabora-online/ is a thing. Never tried it though.

LTSC/LTSB has or had a lot of stuff removed, like Bing on the Start bar search

Same for Windows server... but it's probably too expensive to use it as a desktop OS

> Tbh. after the recent sets of Microsoft ToS/Privacy Terms I would argue _any usage of Microsoft Windows and/or most Microsoft products_ is not legally possible in a public office handling any private or otherwise sensitive data.

Then MS is violating GDPR and must come into compliance, less it risks turning into a cashcow for the EU and get fined billions of dollars day after day.

That doesn't help non-EU users, though.

> to bring the processing operations resulting from its use of Microsoft 365 into compliance with Regulation (EU) 2018/1725.

This isn't GDPR specifically, this is something like "GPDR for EU institutions", so stricter.

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