Is there anything in the article to justify the headline, or is this just clickbait (I read the article, but it just seemed to be a groundless rant)? Are all techrights articles this low quality? (Full disclosure, I'm a Microsoft employee)

I'd say that yes, this is pretty representative of techrights.org articles. It's the former "Boycott Novell", if that means anything to you.

Of course, I'm a Microsoft employee too -- so you and I are obviously involved in a sophisticated astroturfing operation.

Selling SaaS means that any sovereign can shut off your markets like a switch.

The US couldn't tame Microsoft, and the EU was only able to squeeze out some token concessions. The move to selling cloud services left them open to getting kneecapped by the PRC, and it just happened.

That's a two-way street. Any customer in PRC using that service just lost their Office. In many businesses in the USA that would be catastrophic. OTOH, perhaps it'll encourage adoption of LibreOffice.

You've never heard of Kingsoft before have you?

I'm sure it won't encourage adoption of LibreOffice. MS Office's biggest competitor is pirated MS Office, and then after that Kingsoft. Besides, I'm pretty sure most office users in China are not using 365.

Kingsoft is a minor player compared to LibreOffice/ OpenOffice. There's not much interest outside of China, Japan, Hong Kong, etc: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=kingsoft%2C%20libreof...

Honestly a product that has that much SEO spam all over their website can't be that good. Here's the actual site footer: "Hot Searches: Office Free Office Office 2013 Office 2014 Free Writer Free Spreadsheet Free Presentation Download Office Office 2013 Trial Office 2013 Product Key Office for iPad Office Applications Office Tab Office to PDF Microsoft Office to PDF Word to PDF Excel to PDF PowerPoint to PDF PowerPoint to Word DOCX to DOC DOC to PDF XLSX to XLS PPTX to PPT PPTX to PDF PPT to Text Best Office Suite Free Word Spreadsheet Software Microsoft Office 2010 Free Download Microsoft Office 2007 Free Download Microsoft Office 2003 Free Download Microsoft Office Compatible Suite Microsoft Word Replacement Microsoft Excel Replacement Microsoft PowerPoint Replacement Word Processor TechiSky Software Download iStonsoft Flip PDF"

Kingsoft is a major player in mainland China.

Oh yeah, forgot to include that in the list. Added.

It's a bit cynical to describe a ban or censorship of Microsoft software as a win for FOSS: "This will be a big gain for free/libre office suites, including some Chinese versions (IBM employed people in China to work on OpenOffice with ODF)." Censorship of competitors is never a victory for free (as in speech, not as in beer) software.

This article takes me back to slashdot circa 2003. All it's missing is Micro$oft.

The Chinese government makes the NSA look like the ACLU. There is no debate about the Chinese-equivalent NSA in China, it wouldn't be allowed.

Here's wild speculation: what if the copies sold on the back of vans and some of the ones available to download on the web already are already backdoored by the Chinese government, hence the lax attitude to this?

If government agencies can't run Windows anymore, what OS is on the approved list?

They're not actually using Red Flag or Kylin, are they?

honestly I wouldn't be surprised if its related to helping a government run office competitor more then spying.

Quite frankly I'm glad. In my opinion, Microsoft just isn't a very good company. Their products have market share mostly due to inertia, the same way Facebook still clings to users. "Everyone uses Office", so therefore everyone uses Office.

Disclaimer: MS employee, China even. This article is just a diatribe against MS with no interesting or accurate content. Censorship just sucks whether its Facebook, Google, or OneDrive. Trust me, I live it.

And let's not even get started on the blub attack (i.e. people buy Microsoft/Apple/etc...because...marketing! Not because the alternatives sucks so badly...). <sarcasm> I personally prefer Latex, and everyone else is stupid for using office suites with bad keming </sarcasm>.

If Microsoft isn't very good, then I guess Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Harvard Graphics, et. al. were worse. These companies produced widely used word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software before Microsoft entered any of these markets. True most were DOS-based and Microsoft had the insider's advantage building software for Windows, but ultimately MS software succeeded because users liked it, at least compared to the alternatives.

I've used many of the alternatives: Open Office, LibreOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, Koffice; none of them hold a candle to Microsoft Office when you get beyond basic functionality.

Everyone uses Office, because it is the best option for most people. I myself use LaTeX and Emacs whenever possible, and find AbiWord and Gnumeric usable for many things, but in no way do these tools substitute for Office for most people.

Market share is market share

And document standards are standards, except when MS Office ignores them.