True. It is already happened at least once in Germany that a municipality decided to ditch MS products in favour of open source, and went back after people started complaining that buttons are in the wrong places.

It wasn't about that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

It was about many things.

Thank you, that's what I had in mind. The timeline is an amusing read, but as I read it it's really a mix of "buttons in the wrong places" and lobbying.

The thing which stood out to me was the office suite incompatibility statement.

It's probably a legit complaint, but still potentially the fault of Microsoft. People learn how to use Excel, and the free alternative suites don't have all the same functionality (or if they do, it's not the same UI so you have to re-learn it).

And with as prolific as Office is, you're going to have to open office documents. If that doesn't work cleanly, that's a big issue.

I haven't looked into if whatever incompatibilities are a result of Microsoft pressure or technical shenanigans, or it just being a natural consequence of the free suites being less well funded in their development efforts.

I don't think it's impossible to run an enterprise with FOSS - but it is not easy.

Also, AFAIR Bill Gates personally and in person intervened and paid a visit to Munich's mayor Christian Ude.

Here is an interview with Christian Ude in which he mentiones that Bill Gates was unable to understand how reying on Microsoft products would make a city "dependent":

https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/

Translated to English, but this is quite a quote:

> Funnily enough, during the conversation, he kept making new financial offers, including what Microsoft would add to the price, for the school department, for example. They continually became cheaper by a million, another million, another million, and later a dozen million. That's how important the symbol of the renegade state capital of Munich, internationally perceived as an IT stronghold, was to Microsoft.

This was Ballmer though, not gates. Maybe Gates had a separate visit.

they will complain for two weeks, and then get used to it. 90% of all users just use a browser. it's not hard to switch.

It did already happen though. It's not just about buttons of course, there is a lot of lobbying, and if other people you are working with (e.g. other municipalities) stay on MS stack, there are going to be compatibility issues that will of course be blamed on the outliers.

The Wikipedia article doesn't make it obvious, but even Munich itself wasn't able to migrate everyone off of the MS stack. One of the linkrotted sources (https://web.archive.org/web/20180516042059/https://www.techr...) says they had about 17% of computers running Windows after the migration "completed" because some required programs couldn't run on their Linux distro. It's not obvious whether the working model was that 17% of staff used Windows exclusively or all staff had to find a Windows box to do some of their work, but either one sounds pretty obnoxious to me.

It seems to me that the windows UI interface change also very often. Between the excel of win95 and today's there is a big difference.

So it can't be the reason.

I'm really tired of all the overhauls - Win 11 and now Apple.

Except that in reality the issues weren't just buttons in real places, but actual serious issues with work flows, right?

Kinda dishonest framing there.

Having to replace all of your IT employees sounds pretty hard to me.

Or at least train them and get them to buy into a different platform.

you don't need to replace them. retraining them is pretty easy. but these people have invested their careers in the microsoft ecosystem, and will not initiate this kind of change on their own. they need to be pushed.

People prefer familiar tools with which to do their jobs and do not like new tools that reduce their perceived productivity. Film at 10.

Nothing new or innovative happens with this backwards mindset.

Most people do not care. They want to make their customer happy, make their paycheck, deposit it, and live a little on the weekends.

Then repeat that for the next 30-50 years until the paycheck goes to a funeral and burial plot.

Replacing MS with something else (really, anything else, American or otherwise) doesn't result in anything new or innovative anyways. It's document editing and database management. Your city government was doing it with a Commodore 64 in the 1980s.

That is out of touch for professional users. There is nothing on the planet that competes with Excel. Sure there is spreadsheet software, but nothing that has all of the power and features that experts expect.

It would be like if your manager came in and said, “We are switching away from your expensive jetbrains IDE. You can just use notepad, right?”

CIO here

Can confirm that I will take Excel from the cold dead hands of our CFO (and the rest of his dept). Hell even macOS Excel is too much weirdness for them. And being user of both platforms I agree with them.

The rest of the company are very happy though on Google Worksheets, making lists and replying to RFP requests in .xlsx, on their Macbook.

We do a survey every year; 95% of staff is happy with the resources out at their disposition. Including those working on a platform that is not their native platform.

End users are more flexible than we think. Especially non technical ones.

Excel is powerful? Does it do forecasting, statistics or machine learning? Only in a rudimentary sense. Spreadsheets like Excel are low-code tools. Experts in those domains use a real programming language.

People use Excel because it is familiar, because it has distribution. They don't (care to) know any alternatives. If they'd never been familiar with Excel they wouldn't ask for it.

As a former ML engineer, Excel is a surprisingly practical tool even for ML folks. It’s a very tactile tool to touch and feel your data and do quick what ifs without doing a lot of coding. Want a graph? Plot it instead of fudging with matplotlib.

Forecasting? Yes. Dynamic formulas? Yes — much better than writing code (you’d have to write a reactive widget in Jupyter).

Most people don’t need to do ML but they need to do complicated formulas and get immediate feedback. Excel is really good at that. Libre office can do 90% of it but Excel has some advanced features that it doesn’t come close to.

Excel is for playing with data that is already aggregated. You don't see any data scientist in a tech company reaching for spreadsheets. Business analysts use them, maybe, because they work with the raw data rolled up by the engineers.

How are you even going to ingest the data you want to visualize from the database it's in otherwise? It won't fit on your computer as is. You need something like Tableau to query and inspect it.

edit: Sure, let the finance people have their spreadsheets, but don't let that stuff anywhere near engineering and data science. It's a major anti-pattern.

Yes, yes, Excel is the Blub tool. Plenty of other options which are better typed, performant, intuitive, whatever.

Every F500 company has accountants, FPNA, auditors, likely even the CFO who are doing their analysis in Excel. They live and breathe it. It is their everything app which they run 40 hours a week. They know Excel, they are the 10x rockstars of their field.

It is a common refrain here that you should absolutely invest in SAAS tools at $/month if it makes your workers more productive. Even if they are not slinging code, these people already have the best tool for their job. Making them all switch to save a few bucks to a less feature complete option is hamstringing yourself.

Could many people switch without issue? Sure, but it is foolhardy to imagine a 100% cut over without enormous pain to the elite staff.

Good points. It is egregious that HN 'technologists' will tell people that the tool that they use for 40+ hours a week to _get stuff done_ is completely wrong and that they must use python and a text editor instead.

Excel is not powerful. People use it because they are too lazy to learn something new.

There are countless millions of people that are experts in certain domains that do not have the aptitude, confidence, or training to use high-code tools. It is insulting to imply that those people are not experts because they don't use a 'real programming language'. Besides, while imperative programming languages are good at solving a great many problems, they are far from being the best tool for every person, every problem, and every environment.

> There is nothing on the planet that competes with Excel

Debatable. Even then, why that matters? I would think 90% of the world population never used Excel anyway.

> You can just use notepad, right?

No, you are missing the point. Intentionally.

Imagine a world where if experts didn’t spend hundreds of hours learning the non transferable skills of VBA macros and Power-Noun integrations, but rather they spent the much less time developing a basic understanding of scripting and prompting and managed tabular data in ways vastly more powerful than excel in a way that is transparent and debugable. Would we not be much better off? Excel is not an engine of progress. It is an anchor.

this is exactly the point I was trying to make.