[Spooky23]

Microsoft is moving towards and exclusively rent to own model. This is already causing problems for businesses who built adhoc applications in old versions of Access — they lose downgrade rights when moving to O365 and are often pirating Access 2003 or whatever.

That exacerbates the key issue with proprietary general purpose document formats — as users, citizens or companies we lose sovereignty over our data.

When Microsoft decides to cut out some feature in 2030, data produced with it can be forever lost. This is a big deal when Office is the universal language of modern government and business.

This is not an exclusively Microsoft problem either. Google Docs is far worse, but relatively speaking nobody uses it.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> Google Docs is far worse, but relatively speaking nobody uses it.

How do you mean "nobody"?

In any case, at least for now, it's relatively easy to make automatic backups of your entire Google Docs collection, and all these documents can be exported to different formats, including ODT.

[Spooky23]

Note the word relatively. Microsoft has over a billion paid office users. There’s probably another billion pirated users. Google is a few hundred million, and has low penetration into institutions. 3-4 US state governments use Google in a paid capacity. 50 states use Microsoft.

Also, generally speaking, it is preferable to preserve original documents for archival purposes. Export to other formats is problematic in those cases, especially as time marches on and you end up making exported copies of copies.

[yellow_postit]

If those companies have no way of updating their software what’s their approach to security?

[madmulita]

We simply complete the forms saying that we applied all the patches and upgrades that were necesary... and pray for the best. /s

[candiodari]

You could also point out that it mostly consists of not giving untrusted users access to internal stuff, like webapps would.