Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change
If it's AI ... the whole point this version of AI was invented was translation. That's what transformers are for. So why don't they build versions of the apps and pages in every language under the sun from Aztec to Zaparo, from Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform?
Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.
Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.
That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.
Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
> Absolute shit.
> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.
EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
American big tech companies have to pay their workers a lot more than European tech companies.
Microsoft has to pay local taxes on sales in those countries. They are not paying American tax rates on European sales.
Even their American corporate tax rates, if raised to European levels, would still have ample room for profit.
Your argument is not supported by the data.
> but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
It’s nothing like economic dumping. America is not pumping money into Microsoft to dump Microsoft Office into European markets.
Those European companies could come to the US, open an office here, and be under the exact same rules as Microsoft.
The situation is not alike at all.
Nobody was talking about sales tax.
The collusion of US big tech with Ireland to pay very little taxes is well documented. You mention many unrelated facts that are mostly irrelevant to the discussion.
Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
The situation is, in fact, quite alike to chinese state-sponsored companies. The main difference being the tone of media coverage about it in the western world.
That's not a subsidy. That's a customer paying for a product. Apart from that, the USA has Anti-Trust laws, and Microsoft has been at the receiving end of these in the past.
And yes Anti-Trust laws and enforcement exist in theory, and occasionally get applied, leading to small fines. Which is in line with what I wrote. Anti-Trust action has been severely lacking, and I assume that was by design.
Can you evidence this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_shopkeepers
It starts in Wealth of Nations, was picked up by a French revolutionary (still aimed at England, but in a more negative way), and Ben Franklin said something similar about Holland.
Just fire the naysayers (for refusing to work) and you have one problem less.
Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
> Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
If the quotation were correct, the things I listed would always be, instead of sometimes being.
Google Docs and OpenOffice* have been alternatives to MS Office that were actually used in places I've worked, too.
* this was before LibraOffice