Re:"LibreOffice works 365 days a year. Just saying."
by rvz on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:34PM
(#50486817)
Software like this still under-estimates the strength of network effects and inertia.
We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people never stuck around when they struggled to migrate or even choose an instance on Mastodon.
GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Rather than swapping a model, users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home.
With the Microsoft outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software, because all their emails and work is on there. So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice.
It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.
We have seen this effect with Mastodon. Even when Twitter / X was down, hundreds of millions of people never stuck around when they struggled to migrate or even choose an instance on Mastodon.
GitHub, no matter how unreliable it is and will surely go down next week, tens of millions of developers continue to use it rather than actually self-hosting.
The exact same thing with Claude or ChatGPT going down several times a month. Rather than swapping a model, users continue to use both of them instead of local models that don't phone home.
With the Microsoft outage, hundreds of millions of users will continue to use Outlook and the suite of Microsoft software, because all their emails and work is on there. So they just cannot just migrate away from it to LibreOffice.
It is far harder than it sounds due to inertia and most open source projects still do not get that in 2026.