Ask Paul: August 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, it's another blockbuster week for questions, so thanks to everyone for that. Let's kick off the weekend a bit early.
Set yourself free
jeroendegrebber asks:

You shared an update about LibreOffice.

Yes. This hit at the crossroads of two things I care about deeply: Native Windows on Arm support and software that solves a serious enshittification problem, at least for me.

When I was comparing the feature set vs MS Office, I noticed that LibreOffice has none or little of the "online co creating" abilities that MS Office claims to have. My personal experience in this is somewhat limited I must confess, but my team does use other tools like trello, miro, notion etc for task overview, whiteboarding and collaborating on content. In your view, to what extent is Libreoffice solving a type of problem (creating documents) that is maybe becoming less relevant to the workforce? To be honest, Word/Google Docs is currently always a final step in creating something that can be delivered to our clients (with a version number, that our government customers seem to covet).

We forget these things, but the co-creation capabilities in Office were actually inspired by Google Docs, which launched with this as its central benefit (and was otherwise dismissed as being too light a tool to take on Office). Microsoft responded with its Office Web Apps, which were limited in many other ways, and eventually pushed collaborative editing to the desktop apps starting with Office 2010. This always felt wonky to me, and my experiences live editing in OneNote with Mary Jo for the Windows Weekly show notes were so consistently terrible that I switched to Notion and never looked back. So I can't speak to how well it works today.

I also have no opinions about how popular or necessary this functionality is. But it's always felt shoehorned in on the Microsoft side, and I suspect that's because it was, and that this is why Microsoft has been working on the Fluid Framework infrastructure that we see now in Loop, not just the standalone app, but it's integration throughout Office, especially in Teams and Outlook. In other words, live collaboration in traditional documents is what's out of date--what's solving a problem that is become less relevant to customers--and that the future of collaboration is what we see now in solutions like Teams (or Trello, Notion, whatever).

We all evaluate LibreOffice or whatever software based on our own needs. But the cart this horse is following is traditional productivity apps, as expressed by the Office desktop suite. And its core competency was obtained via antitrust regulator forcing Microsoft to open up its proprietary document formats. Now that Microsoft uses open standards for that, LibreOffice and other software can be fully compatible, though as an open solution, it of course defaults to the OpenDocument format that was specifically created as an alternative to Microsoft's then-proprietary formats. So...