Admittedly civil servants in many countries have the image of doing these jobs less passionately than someone working in business would, but this does not change what is expected of them.
Cutting on the productivity on an expensive workforce very seldomly leads to actual cost reduction.
Let me clarify my point: most people (civil servants being only one example among others) don't use even 10% of MS Office capabilities (esp. on Excel, I've never seen anything but basic formulas, no array formulas, no macros and so on). For these people using a tool that performs reasonably well on these 10% is not a stupid choice.
Of course, MS Office is better than LibreOffice. But LibreOffice is absolutely no shitty software and most of the time it gets the job done.
We can hope that this issue gets solved if more heavily invested in. The "10% of savings go towards developing free software" rule is promising.
2007 is different because of the ribbon, I'll grant, but preference for the ribbon is far from universal.
"He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software."
So let's see some examples then.
Why is LibreOffice "absolutely dreadful"?
In GIMP, where are the layer groups? The nondestructive editing?
These are basic tools to a professional workflow.
And don't get me started on CMYK. You cannot do prepress without CMYK support; GIMP was going to get it Real Soon Now for the past ten years and it's still not there.
GIMP is the story of what happens when you wait with new features until "the right solution" is completed. Not that I really blame them since they have very few developers.
pivot tables and VBA sucks (you may NOT comment on what a horrible language VBA is. )
I didn't ask which of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite is better than the programs in the LibreOffice suite, I asked why LibreOffice sucks.
Also LibreOffice has Python.
LibreOffice is much the same, but I think the gap is actually much smaller. Microsoft Office does have some niche features that are not replicated by LibreOffice, and Microsoft has made their formats for annotations and other features that should be simple sufficiently complex to make import/export difficult, but LibreOffice in my experience is faster and has more of the features that I like and use (at least more accessible; apparently someone has said Office now includes direct PDF export, so that's nice). I use LibreOffice even if I'm using a computer with Microsoft Office installed. As with GIMP, in some specific cases, Word may be required, but in most cases LibreOffice works just fine and saves you hundreds of dollars.
The exception here is probably Calc v. Excel, because it seems true in my experience that Excel has many more features for power users than Calc.