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@watabstract
Simple use case that I experience almost every day in the office:
I write a letter. At my work we work according to the four-eyes principle, which means that my letters (and those of my colleagues) are checked by a colleague. So I email my letter to a colleague. This colleague reads my letter, corrects a few spelling mistakes if necessary and makes a few comments if necessary, and then sends the letter back via email. I look at the colleague’s advice and decide whether to do something with it or not.
In order for the layout of the letter that I open after returning it to look the same as when I sent it, my colleague and I have to use the same word processing program, which can differ by no more than one or two version numbers. I’ve tried it myself with different file formats for MS Word and Libre Office and with a little formatting a letter is no longer the same after saving and opening it twice. This will undoubtedly be Microsoft’s fault and this will undoubtedly have to change in the future, but it is the reality we are dealing with now.
(The same goes for sharing Excel spreadsheets with more than basic features.)
If your starting situation is Windows with MS Office, you won’t be able to get away from it. Even switching to Windows with Libre Office is complicated as all your standard/sample letters need to be changed as well as the Excel spreadsheets you use. And if you’ve ever seen the panic in the eyes of an average user when an icon changes position (or even color) in a new version of a program, then you understand that this is not an easy thing to do in a company of a few thousand The task is so that employees can use a completely different office suite.
Now you can put together a whole tree that these are exactly examples of vendor lock-in that you should get rid of and that ideally do not exist, but rather represent the current initial situation. And if everyone was on Libre Office, you would have exactly the same situation. Compatibility with other office suites is not guaranteed (perhaps a little more likely with .ODT). Continuity (that employees are not forced to learn a new program again) is also not guaranteed; I can imagine that MS Office (in a gradually modified form) will still exist in 20 years, while I’m not so sure about Libre Office. When Libre Office dies, there will undoubtedly be a fork that becomes dominant (just as Libre Office became the dominant fork of Open Office), but this often happens in phases where compatibility and continuity have problems and jumps that one cannot expect . want to suspend a company.
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