alt Hacker NewsNow that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
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The issue with building alternatives is always that it is quite easy to get something that can do 90% or more of the work, but the remainder takes a lot more time to pull off.
Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.
Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
> Absolute shit.
> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.
EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.
The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
You can't clone decades of history.
> Now that software is cheap
Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.
Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.
That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.
Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.
The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).