[likium]

There is a viable market, it exists as a word + excel combination like Notion, Coda and Monday. Notion just recently had an email and calendar client.

And I don't think non-US or non EU-wages, or being open source would help. Microsoft's success is due to the lock in and GTM sales org that Microsoft has. Just see how Teams eclipsed over Slack despite the latter being a first-mover and a better quality product.

[bsrkf]

Nowhere have I claimed that the whole product would need (nor should) be fully open source and why wouldn't non-US wages help?

Assuming it takes me X-amount of software engineering hours to produce an alpha version of a given product and now let's imagine a rented office space plus four developers; consider renting in a major US city, and paying competitive US-major-city-wages versus doing so in a significantly smaller city in Eastern Europe (Czechoslovakia, Romania, Estonia).

In both cases you could develop an English-Language version of your product for global use and you can distribute software cheaply over the internet; you'd still charge customers in the US US-prices, yet would have saved on development costs.

I'm sure this comes with its own set of difficulties, especially regarding US business customers, but initially it could be an advantage in certain scenarios.

There also seems to be a current push towards non-US (sometimes even specifically from-EU) products in tech, which might give one an interesting market position, albeit I'm lacking details here, and it's yet to pan out how viable this trend is long-term of course.