Microsoft claims that their tools can open OpenDocument files, that, you know, adhere to a well defined standard. So, why is it a problem to use those formats by default?

There is an ISO standard, yes. Overly complex for the simplest things, but whatever.

Then there's the actual de-facto reference implementation, which does not adhere strictly to that standard in the first place, meaning any other implementation that claims great compatibility with MS Office files will need to have "ISO standard" mode and "ISO standard but not really" mode.

Then there's the occasional extension to the standard, using not-yet (sometimes never) standardized additions, developed behind closed doors, whose behavior varies slightly from one version to another. Any other "compliant" implementation will also have to support them, but this time, oops, no documentation, good luck.

And, supposedly, Microsoft tools do support OpenDocument. But, given the limited amount of resource Microsoft have, they can't implement it very well, despite also being an ISO standard. Weirdly, it's always open/free/small business that have to put in the work and the money to support the ever changing non-compliant formats pushed by Microsoft. I wonder why.

The point is, no matter how popular alternative gets, there will always be a boss somewhere that goes "I can't open that document, fix that", and the only direction this ever move, is toward "we must support Microsoft shenanigans", never in the opposite direction. Then comes the EU, today, going "yep, let's do our best to adhere to Microsoft dominance and keep empowering them in it". I understand why some people are miffed by that.

I hear the "but I have to be able to read a document" argument, because it is true. But it is also true that playing catch-up with an openly hostile actor that have zero incentive to help anyone else in the race can only lead to losing said race.

You really have to be a disconnected executive to say stuff like "people didn't like having access to our games, so we'll stop selling to them".

Somebody fucked up, some people will gain (maybe massively) from this, and other have their work shat on, but who cares, it's just a woopsy tootsy, no need to do anything, eh?

There's this novel idea of making a good product and selling that they could explore, instead of making a product, crippling it, then asking for money to remove the damages.

This kinda reminds me of youtube, getting paid to show ads on one side, then getting paid to not show ads on the other side. Except this time, they skipped the firsts part.

I can see the appeal though, make something, then make it annoying, then get paid to remove the annoyance. Seems like an easy path to get some money from fools. Thankfully, brave is already known for being scummy all around; I hope people will not fall for this too much.

I never touched 0365, but if your organization is already using nextcloud extensively, Collabora Online is trivial to setup and is available seamlessly from the files view, with collaborative editing built-in.

Because of the way it is designed (handling the file on a remote webdav with some permissions in the way) it might be possible to integrate with other solutions, but I never had to look into that either.

Browsers are, for most people, a white (or black) empty square that gets filled with whatever website is trendy. The least intrusive it is the better.

I'm not sure focusing on a redesign with flashy elements and bigger (and emptier) components, alongside with color-changing and other bells and whistle is improving the experience for anyone. It certainly won't help with less tech-literate users that are lost every time anything change. It won't help with power users, because they tend to have functionality over excessive design, and that sounds like it. It won't help with people that like "slick" design because, again, most of the time a web browser have very little element of its own UI on screen *by design*.

At best, the tab bar is there but if they decide to make it bigger and flashier and choke-full of extra features that nobody asked for, I'm fairly certain that adoption will not skyrocket this time either. The only people this would have a notable impact on are people that don't use their web browser as a web browser, I guess.

And in the meantime, there's two distinct "profile" features, bookmark management is abysmally bad, the side panel remain mostly unusable except for the handful of thing mozilla deemed worthy of it, performances are spotty on a beefy gaming PC, some long-standing compatibilities issues remain open I did not know that Mozilla was rolling in so much money that they could divert development resources to "shiny things nobody will see most of the time".

That would be a monumental waste of resource. We're using Collabora Online with nextcloud, it's well integrated and works well for quick edit, viewing, and some collaborative edits. Over the time it got serious performances and usability improvements. And all this without deviating much from the "original" idea of being LibreOffice (like) online.

At this point, why not either direct people to this existing, alive, useful project? Worst case scenario Collabora turns evil and decides to close it, in which case, fork *this* instead of the rotten husk of a broken idea that stayed in limbo so long it's evocation is used to scare children that refuses to sleep.

Especially since collabora seems quite competent with TDF projects, so it would make sense to ask *them* to work on it, if there's funding.

Unless I missed the memo saying that large open source projects suddenly got so much resources they have to burn them aimlessly, reusing existing, solid ground work sounds better than starting from scratch at every occasion.

The issue is that to maybe have some grand purpose, these "agents" require access to both data and a mean to action. And you can bet that for most people, if you have actual safeguards outside of the control of these "agents", say, a confirmation box with a sequence of actions, most people will blindly click "ok", while most other people will look for a way to disable the confirmation.

It's not a new problem either. The attack surface provided by the human interface was always a good one; keylogger, screen capture, scam/phishing targeted to the human, etc. The "only" change is that now, a rogue, semi-random agent will be allowed to behave erratically, while it's been proven time and time that these can be heavily influenced by inputs we're gladly giving them.

Basically, the human remain the weak point we're just looking to automate the scam part.

To be a bit more constructive, I agree that such things, should they prove to be valuable, should only run locally, with small, tailored models, with fully controlled input/output. Far for the dream of Iron Man's Jarvis, I know, but eh.

When your aunt click on the "sleep" button after an update and now the fans keeps spinning, and the device wakes up unexpectedly to do some "helpful" thing no user asked for, the appeal will quickly wane. On embedded/mobile/whatever device, power consumption is a must, and most of them are *designed* to be woke regularly in regular use. On a desktop/laptop, the "surprise, I wasn't sleeping" would require some adaptations. A laptop "waking up" in a backpack because you thought it was asleep would be bad, for example. And even today, I have a coworker that had to fiddle a LOT with his windows computer that just kept waking up in the middle of the night for no apparent reasons.

Basically, on a "full-fledged" computer, if I hit sleep, it should sleep. If I want it to be super available, I just leave it there, CPU will get to his lowest power state to do basically nothing, screens will turn off, fans, will ramp down (assuming it's not burning summer), and there will be no chance for confusion. This would consume more power, but probably not that much. When idle, a modern computer goes very low in that regard.

Is it a surprise that a tech that's mostly made to act as a yes man accept stupid requests?

If only this was posted on a news site, under some pretense of bringing information to the readers, right?

You're missing the point. Some people want to enjoy other's creations. Some people care about what's behind a piece. The question is not "can an LLM generate something decent", we already reached that point. The question is, why would I pay $80 for that. If you feel like it, sure, go for it. Some people don't.

Microsoft killed wordpad. It seems that a small text editor with basic formatting and some text-related features was NOT something people wanted.

Which makes the inclusion of basic formatting and some text-related features in notepad even more baffling.