Your daily dose of “fuck Microsoft” is here!
The Document Foundation (TDF) recently announced the release of LibreOffice 26.8, and while it packs many new features, its highlight is the lack of any AI integration. This is quite the opposite of what Microsoft has been doing with its Office suite, but the tale of the disagreements between these two entities is as old as time itself, so nothing surprising. Now, TDF has explained why it cannot display some fancy charts that Microsoft Office can visualize without a problem.
Also explained at LO’s blog, with a less of a clickbait title: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/17/libreoffice-26-8-and-interoperability/
This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.
I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.
Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.
Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.
Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).
The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.
The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.
All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.
It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.
Well, now I feel old.
I do feel like anyone who hasn’t had to write multiple-hundred-page technical documents in Framemaker on an HP-UX C100 workstation with a couple of hundred MB of RAM shouldn’t be allowed to complain about any modern office software.
And don’t get me started on “automating the secretarial pool for fun and profit with WordPerfect DOS macros.”
Kids today…