The thing that astounds me the most is that it's the single clearest example of a monopoly in history. There really is no better example of a monopoly in any industry ever. Microsoft had >95% of desktops running Windows, and the many various government organisations all over the world tasked with preventing and dealing with these sorts of monopolies did nothing.

In all fairness, there is hardly anything to be done about it. You just can't come up with a full MS Office replacement fast enough to be relevant.

Short of completely dismantling Microsoft, or even seizing their assets by governments (two options I don't approve of), I don't see a way to break that monopoly as long as this kind of Office Software is relevant.

Dismantling Microsoft would absolutely be the correct response. That's what they did to Bell or AT&T or whatever they were called, and it was a good thing.

Break up Microsoft into a company that makes Office, a company that makes Windows and a company that does .NET.

Hell, Microsoft already internally operates like that anyway. Might as well take it to its logical conclusion :)

Exactly. An industry with a high barrier to entry is prone to becoming a monopoly.

This is why I think governments should fund libre alternative projects substantially and long-term. It is a matter of national interest.

LibreOffice Calc is missing features that are required by many users? The government should pay for it to be developed.

The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.

Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.

Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.

Governments neither need to nor should fund free software. The US Government should have fined Microsoft at least $10billion for their monopolistic business practices when they had 95% of the desktop OS market, then dismantled the company into its constituent parts, then used that fine to set up a fund to fund innovative software development companies.

Instead, they... did nothing. Classic US government.

>The ironic thing is that it is not even expensive to break this monopoly. So many countries share this interest in breaking the monopoly.

It's not expensive at all, no. It's the opposite of expensive. Microsoft has done countless things that are completely explicitly illegal to do, that are very anti-competitive. They should have been fined billions and broken up a decade or more ago. No lawsuits, no juries, just the FTC doing what it was made to do.

>Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me.

I have no idea how you think it's okay to blame the EU for 'protecting farmers' while not blaming the US for its much more pervasive farmer protectionism and subsidies (including paying people not to farm their land) and not dealing with Microsoft themselves, an American company.

>Most politicians are old and most old people don't understand computers, the internet and it's consequences. They don't get what is at stake. I still hope that some day people will get elected in Europe that understand theses issues.

Saying that 'politicians are old and don't understand computers' might have made sense three decades ago, but it makes less and less sense today. Politicians today grew up with computers.

The issue here, is that even as LO is firming up, the masses are moving to google docs and o365's online options... Which does reduce some barriers to switching, but introduces other development costs. MS is really good at making software, maybe not the best at UI/UX, but meeting needs in a relatively short period of time compared to competitors. o365 seems at first glance to be a bit better than google docs, and MS was pretty late to the party there.

Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.

>Government can very rarely outpace private business in terms of getting things like this done.

That's not really true, it's never ever really been true. It's capitalist propaganda that 'the Government is useless', and it's mainly propped up by extremely liberal governments (Republicans and Democrats, for example) that make the Government useless on purpose then say 'hey look the Government sucks'.

Not that it should ever need to be Government writing software to compete against Microsoft. Governments have much, much better tools for dealing with monopolies than trying to outcompete them. They're the only ones that have those tools. They should use them aggressively.

I'm not saying that governments don't have a place. Enforcing the law (including judicial sentencing), providing a common defense, and ensuring essential infrastructure are top among them.

I'm not entirely in favor of governments competing with business... or propping them up. They should only interfere when there is a lack of opportunity to compete, either with unfair practices, or coercion.

Also, is there something wrong with capitalism? Note: that what we have is not really or nearly a free market, and that patent/copyright protections really need to be adjust to move in that direction.

The government can fund private business developing free software to outpace another private business.

For example Continuum Analytics is partly funded by public sources to work on open data science, competing against commercial offerings from SAS, for example. The Blender Foundation has some public funding for developing new features for the Blender 3D software suite, partly through public film funding.

>The government can fund private business developing free software to outpace another private business.

Why? Governments are the only ones with the tools to actually deal with monopolies properly without competing with them: breaking them up, fining them extremely fiercely, etc.

"Why the EU spends billions to protect farmers but is not willing to spend millions to finish and maintain a nearly workable independent software infrastructure is beyond me."

To be fair, food is a bit more important than software :)

Otherwise, I agree. This absolutely needs to be a public policy issue. Movements like the Pirate Party are a step in the right direction, and hopefully victories like in Iceland will prove to be more than just one-off occurrences.

No, an industry with a company that has a very long history of extremely anticompetitive practices is prone to becoming a monopoly. There's nothing inherently pro-monopoly about office software or operating system software. There is something inherently pro-monopoly about Microsoft.