I continue to feel imposed upon whenever anyone sends me a DOCX/XLSX file, based on the (incorrect as it happens) assumption that I, like them (or their employer), have sold out my personal sovereignty to the Redmond borg. Makes me feel sad the the level of awareness of "fully compromised personal liberty" is so breathtakingly low. In addition to the impending climate catastrophe, there're at least a couple more elephants in this room, people.
@lightweight I work in government and manage to get by with libreoffice, but it is actually crazy to me that we license Office for 5-8 thousand employees.
What's almost comical is that every time someone sends me something in Word or PowerPoint format it'll end up being incomprehensible and I have to spend time communicating with them to even figure out what they actually want.
I think we'd be better off discouraging the use of these tools internally. Even if it were open formats.
@rune this depicts the state of the NZ gov't's relationship (and, by extension, most other NZ organisations/bizzes who need to comply/interact with gov't) with the Microsoft Corporation: https://davelane.nz/mshostage tl;dr NZ and its people are quite unaware that they are effective hostages of MSFT.
@lightweight that's just the beginning. All our mailboxes are in 365, we use Azure, their OMS logging platform, "advanced threat protection".
It would take years maybe decades to get out if Microsoft decided to screw us over.
@rune Yup. NZ (and most other countries) could be shut down more or less indefinitely through either one of: MSFT "teaching us a lesson" if we challenge them (see South Korea), their monoculture being pwned by a third party (e.g. US "intelligence" or a bot net herder), or subtle incompetence (most likely scenario) like a slow-burn update screwup that corrupts system data or similar.
@rune I tend to agree. Those tools give power without the knowledge or maturity to understand how to use it. We (in the web dev world) refer to the results as "angry fruit salad". Given that no one really knows what "semantic" means any more, and MSO's interface is a chaotic hodgepodge of semantic and ad hoc tools, it's no wonder PDFs are seen as anti-accessibility (they were all created in MSO by people who had no idea what a valid document even is).