Google has drop in replacements for most of it. But that doesn’t solve the problem of using US tech.

France have already developed their own (recently posted here) [1][2].

Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting. Yes, you will not get 100% of the Office 365 features out of the box. There will be some friction.

It's simply ridiculous seeing EU bureaucracy preparing e.g. to ban russian oil [3], making life more expensive for all people, and balking on being forced to switch their stupid word processor.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923736

[2] https://github.com/suitenumerique

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-propose-permanent...

	▲	mgoetzke 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Considering that I doubt most normal office-user people even use features in Word other than changing fonts etc I doubt that will be a big issue anyway.
	▲	lukan 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		"Also, the "there's no drop in replacement" line is just making up excuses for not acting" If you claim, that this is my position, please read at least one more sentence "So yes, one can (and should) build them. "
	▲	Jolter 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Good luck convincing the government (or local councils) of Bulgaria to migrate to an office suite that’s available in French or English only. That’s beside the sibling comment’s point that this suite is not complete enough (yet).
	▲	Forgeties79 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What France is doing is great but, as you’ll see discussed in that HN comment section, it is hardly an office suite. It’s not a full replacement by a long shot. I hope it will be one day though!

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Johnny555 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.

I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.

Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.

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wasabi991011 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?

	▲	Johnny555 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.