*Intuitively it seems like text-first documents (markdown, etc.) should better lend themselves to tools like diff or git, or any other collaboration tool, especially a real-time edit tool.*

Well don’t explain it to me I know that stuff. Go grab 2-3 office workers and try to explain markdown to them. If you’re lucky maybe they won’t leave when you move on to explain Git.

I worked one time with a guy that wanted to convince sales department to write documents in LaTex so then it could be well printed for the customers and also put in Git … well they laughed the guy out of the room - well before he’s even started explaining formats for presentation vs formats for editing.

I see how business people we work with on documents understand I have a cursor here and I type and there is my avatar/photo on top that I am active - I see how they wouldn’t understand Git diff at all and would just move on presented with Git diff not even wanting to collaborate.

Agreed... The level of integration across MS products in business is hard to entirely quantify.

NextCloud/OwnCloud and other options can deliver some of it, but all of it is harder... Just email/calendar/contacts is hard to match... Then file collaboration and syncing... And all the corner cases in the various office formats.

Even the non mainline office app, Visio does a lot of things competing apps just don't.

I tend to prefer open source apps for myself, and for code projects, I'll focus on markdown for docs etc... but definitely understand why a corp would just pay the monthly Microsoft tax for all employees.

With the improved web versions, Linux on the desktop becomes an option even then.