[kfk]

The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.

[fulafel]

The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost.

People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.

And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).

[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-critical-...

[1] https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/microsoft-exchange-...

[2] https://digital.nhs.uk/cyber-alerts/2021/cc-3977

[oezi]

People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing.

As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.

[okasaki]

Teams and Microsoft in general is foisted on people by IT departments. Nobody chooses to use it.

[javcasas]

You don't hate teams. I hate teams. Because it's ultra-slow and bloated, and used to eat 1.5 CPU cores all the time until I threw it permanently on a browser window. And now it doesn't notify me when other people send me a message.

Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.

[hulitu]

> People don't hate Teams.

Yes, hate is a soft word in this case. We despise it, we wish its creators burned in hell together with the management who chose it.

Teams is the opposite of engineering, is the bully boy around the corner.

To call Teams a shit, means giving it consistence, which it doesn't have.

[Kwpolska]

> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality

People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).

> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions

What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?

> information is siloed to only meeting participants

You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.

[robin_reala]

I absolutely cannot stand Office. Word is basically acceptable, but I refuse to use PowerPoint unless absolutely forced to. The major problem though is that every single component is blighted by the Ribbon, which among all the bad things that Microsoft has done is the worst.

[croes]

The hate for Office depends on the use case.

The more sophisticated your documents get the more you hate Office.

[moooo99]

> People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office

They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job

[johannes1234321]

There are two kinds of programs: The ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses" (freely after Bjarne Stroustrup)

[the_cramer]

This is worthy of some sources, no? People on HN, technology professionals, might hate office. But we're not majority and I've never seen researched/polled numbers about hating office...

[moooo99]

I doubt that there are any reputable sources you could find that aren't shaped by bias (of MS or competitors). However, I have worked in a non-IT related job for years and about 90% of complaints about software we use would fit into one of two buckets

1.) Microsoft Office

2.) SAP

I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family

[hulitu]

Maybe go in an office and ask ?

[oneshtein]

The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control.

IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).

[dijit]

How would that even help?

Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is:

1. Fear of retraining

2. Fear of untrodden path

but most crucially:

3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses

[croes]

>3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses

That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.

Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.

The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.

Have seen that more than once.

[oriolid]

> That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.

PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.

Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.

[croes]

PDF is still less worse than Office documents especially if you avoid Adbobe Acrobat Reader

[inglor]

Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI.

So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.

Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).

I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)

[kaliszad]

That doesn't seem to be accurate. [0] [1] Microsoft consistently does mistakes that put its customers at risk, like being unable to secure their development environment so that when encryption keys leak in a badly sanitized dump into the dev environment they are almost immediately misused by other state actors against the US federal agencies. [2] How can you trust anything that comes out of the development if you cannot be reasonably sure about the security of it? And we cant really trust Microsoft reports either because of "Inaccurate public statements" (euphemism for lying). [0]

And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.

Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a... [2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec... [3] https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...

[croes]

The problem is the cloud as such.

And MS tries to force you into the cloud.

[flakeoil]

It's not about data, it's about being pre-installed in the OS, being first to market, being the default at school, bundled as an office pack with other tools, networks effects as people already know it it's easier to continue to use it etc. Where the data is stored is secondary.

Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Yes. Data can and will be used against people wether it's petty scamming or political/war operations. If there is uncontrolled prolifiration of personal data it makes this much easier to exploit

[npteljes]

ONLYOFFICE supports this. The webservice they host supports different "storage backends", which can be something they offer, or Dropbox, or your own Nextcloud instance, etc.

[oneshtein]

"Storage backend" is not a "storage frontend" I'm talking about.

Example scenario:

As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.

To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.

When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.

Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.

NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".

When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.

Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.

Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).

In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.

[nonrandomstring]

The end of Microsoft in Europe will be its poor security.

These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.

Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.

[BlueTemplar]

Well, that, or the executive arms of the EU could stop being in denial about US infocom companies being legal in the EU.

(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)

[longhornjs]

The EU has compelled companies to switch to Microsoft — yes, you read that correctly. The EU introduced the GDPR law, which significantly increased the complexity of using third-party services. To minimize this complexity, companies found it more straightforward to consolidate their services with Microsoft, as it facilitates easier compliance with EU GDPR regulations.

Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.

[kaliszad]

That seems like checkbox-compliance theater. Also doesn't seem to be supported by official findings. There are notions that actually you cannot be fully GDPR compliant with Microsoft 365. [0] Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings. [1]

[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...

[hulitu]

This is "checkbox-compliance theater".

>Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings

And then come back to Mother Microsoft. See Munich.