The media response to this omits the fact that these vibe coded "reverse engineered" apps hardly work and we've had open source alternatives to the Microsoft and Adobe products for years. The narrative they're pushing is a frontier model can make a perfect clone of any app, and the reality is it makes a ui that looks somewhat similar but none of the functionality actually works.
Also wake me up when there’s a cloud version that works in an even vaguely similar way.
The Office advantage is a suite of apps and integrations with their cloud offerings. That’s their big moat against vibe-coded apps, because few vibe-coders want to maintain a SaaS service for Office files and even fewer CIOs want to commit their company to use that service when Microsoft exists and is proven to work.
The web versions are passable, but the native versions are non-extant, and the handoff story leaves much to be desired. You can’t, say, have one person editing native and one person editing on web.
Yeah though FWIW, the overall impact of companies realizing maybe they shouldn't be spending $100k a year on a document editor is likely to raise all boats for alternatives.
It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.
I think a lot of people forget about the labor costs of migrating. The $30/mo looks cheap compared to all of the time spent trying to teach end users how to use something else
Part of the potential of these vibe coded clones is that the UI and workflows will be very similar to the genuine Microsoft products. So if they're actually completed and debugged then a migration won't necessarily require end user retraining.
i dont think anyone thinks it's worth that on its own, but you need some kind of user management (entra id in this case), some kind of cloud storage (sharepoint in this case) and some kind of standard document format (docx, xlsx, pptx in this case) in any company.
of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.
Entra ID is separate if you don't want logins from Nigeria. One of the most insane-to-me things is Office 365 is basically "open access by default" and you have to pay $6/month/user to fix it. Most people don't realize just how much attack surface they open up moving their data to the cloud, and that it costs a lot to even start to get back towards a secure environment like you had on-premise.
But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.
You've fallen prey to the "Everyone is stupid except me" fallacy.
By the time you add cloud-storage space integration (SharePoint), live collaborative editing, support hotline, support for 30 year old macros, and Active directory user integration, you'll be charging the same per seat.
Paying for software is perfectly fine. If people don’t want to pay for office there isn’t a lack of alternatives at all. Google doc is right here for them to use of they want a free cloud version.
The idea that companies with subscriptions are extorting users is cancerous nonsense
I'd rather wish people put effort into LibreOffice.
I'd hoped there would be significant improvements there as there is a huge scope of bug/compatibility fixes. But I guess it is not sexy enough.
Yeah, this entire saga is really unfortunate. The narrative is really enticing (AI is obsoleting Adobe/Microsoft/other corporate software behemoths!) when the reality is it's a vibe-coded slopware that barely functions, according to anyone who has actually tried it, and there are other FOSS alternatives which are much more stable, mature, and deserve people's attention. I wonder how many people shouting "Claude vibed a Photoshop clone, Adobe is done!!" were even aware Krita or GIMP existed.
I'd rather not. LibreOffice is terrible and probably unfixable. It's certainly better than these vibecoded alternatives, but not where the effort should go. We need new leadership in the open source office space.
I'm willing to take the other side of that bet. Quoting this article [1]:
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.
LibreOffice has to be feature-per-feature, bug-per-bug compatible with a poorly-documented office suite that's been around for 35 years, so it's no surprise that they don't always get it right. I don't see a new office suite doing any better, unless they decide that compatibility with MS Word is no longer a priority.
OnlyOffice, despite being newer than LibreOffice, has better compatibility with office documents and is way ahead in terms of UI. Plus it runs on Linux.
Do they even allow AI contributions? I'd love to contribute if they do.
Some people tell me why not donate instead, and the reason is the same as me giving people actual presents instead of gift cards: I take the time to choose and understand an issue, spend time on it, just like I spend time picking a present. Both are riskier than giving money directly, but the euphoria of having my PR get merged or present being appreciated is addictive :)
It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.
Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.
So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.
And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.
Can relate to that. Nowadays it's much easier for me to fork a project and fix the bugs for myself rather than convincing the maintainers that my niche bug is worth a fix and the fix is worthy.
This would be interesting if it was based on markdown and Jupyter notebooks and all that good stuff we have today.
But just replicating what was useful some 37 years ago to get office workers accustomed to the new digital world? Why?
I've been thinking about this these days, this is the final revenge of open source. After having ingurgitated all the open source projects there exist in the world, AI is making basically all software un-copyrighteable (yes, you can't copyright a picture made by AI as you can't copyright a piece of software made -entirely- by AI).
Yep, I realized this back in February, you can remake basically anything in a drastically shorter span of time with a single frontier model and patience and test thoroughly.
It should be doable to vibe code all Microsoft Office apps by using Apache OpenOffice as input. The Artcraft team seems to have successfully been able to vibe code all of Adobe's creative suite https://getartcraft.com
My thinking is that cloning existing apps is missing the point. It still takes a disproportionate amount of time to get all of the functionalities and quirks of the original right.
But, it takes no time to get the handful of things you need working, on your system. That is where I see the most potential: there is little need for massive pieces of software that do everything, I can build the components I need, customized for my use case, and move on.
Does that actually work with Office tools? Like yes you can make your own documents and spreadsheets. But what about when you receive something from someone else? Or need to send it back after doing your edits? Do the files still work correctly?
Big part of the value is in true interoperability...
We are really speed running destroying the software market, the long term effects won’t be nice. There is a reason FLOSS isn’t about cloning 1-1 existing applications. That’s something we could always have done if we really wanted. What we will end up with will be corporations pushing everything to the cloud, pushing for even stricter copyright/trademark protections to fight against that type of clones, stricter controls over software distribution.
Instead of using the power of LLMs to create genuine new products we instead get clone factories just to avoid paying or switch to an alternative. What a really dumb future we are building here, where trying to create novel software is a risk because any 14yo with a Claude subscription will clone it, distribute it for free. At least with keygen someone had to be pretty skillful and the distribution was niche…
A very small group of companies have the infrastructure required to train and serve a frontier model. They have a stranglehold on the compute/resources required for a new participant to break in.
And an overwhelming majority of enterprises running AI in production do so via one of two providers.
We'll like have an open-weight opus 5.5 class model we can run on (fancy) local hardware in a year or two at full perf, especially with AI optimized M7 macs. That's pretty distributed IMO.
Genuinely curious: what weird quirks have you encountered in Excel? Back 10 years ago when I was using Excel daily I didn’t think anything was weird about it (it was actually my favorite tool)
Maybe that's many are convinced AI can replace developers, they can only see the surface of software and think there's not much more underneath it...
The Office advantage is a suite of apps and integrations with their cloud offerings. That’s their big moat against vibe-coded apps, because few vibe-coders want to maintain a SaaS service for Office files and even fewer CIOs want to commit their company to use that service when Microsoft exists and is proven to work.
NextCloud has had an office suite offering for many years.
It remains really wild people think Office is worth $30/month/user. Anything that erodes that belief is a net positive.
of course you can do all that with open source stuff but office is just easy to buy and hard to get rid of once you have bought in. the bigger your company the harder it is to migrate.
But yeah, the lock-in effect is huge. Microsoft cloud products deliberately don't work well with anything but more of their own cloud products. And as soon as you start a migration to it based on what you need, you suddenly realize how much other stuff you also need to pay them for. And you can't escape without replacing all of it.
By the time you add cloud-storage space integration (SharePoint), live collaborative editing, support hotline, support for 30 year old macros, and Active directory user integration, you'll be charging the same per seat.
But hey, proof me wrong please. Code it.
The idea that companies with subscriptions are extorting users is cancerous nonsense
https://www.photopea.com/
comes closer, though I think it's web only.
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it.
LibreOffice has to be feature-per-feature, bug-per-bug compatible with a poorly-documented office suite that's been around for 35 years, so it's no surprise that they don't always get it right. I don't see a new office suite doing any better, unless they decide that compatibility with MS Word is no longer a priority.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Some people tell me why not donate instead, and the reason is the same as me giving people actual presents instead of gift cards: I take the time to choose and understand an issue, spend time on it, just like I spend time picking a present. Both are riskier than giving money directly, but the euphoria of having my PR get merged or present being appreciated is addictive :)
It has atrocious UX. Crazy bloat from promising to support every one-off file format under the sun for the last 25 years.
Trying to get a PR commit committed is like dealing with an entire army of bureaucrats.
So I get it would be great (in theory) if people wanted to support this, but at the same time it’s too far behind —- and the team is too entrenched in bad UX decisions, ackward support mandates for obscure systems that in reality nobody ever really used.
And this is a hill I’ll die on… Permissive licenses > copyleft. If I fork your code, as long as I put your name in the credits, the code is mine to do whatever I want with. Past authors shouldn't get a say in what I build next. That's real open source.
Has the author even opened the apps, let alone tried to use them?
> GridCraft on getartcraft.com
> WordCraft on getartcraft.com
> 404 This page could not be found
(though, "to be fair", not existing is "far from what they intend to replace")
Big part of the value is in true interoperability...
https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft
However these apps are really bad. Basically nonfunctional PoCs made to generate a hype wave.
Instead of using the power of LLMs to create genuine new products we instead get clone factories just to avoid paying or switch to an alternative. What a really dumb future we are building here, where trying to create novel software is a risk because any 14yo with a Claude subscription will clone it, distribute it for free. At least with keygen someone had to be pretty skillful and the distribution was niche…
And an overwhelming majority of enterprises running AI in production do so via one of two providers.
There are plenty of stories, some of them:
Pasting old dates: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2015/aug/excel-d...
Low row limit: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/excel-specificatio...
Conversions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4994289/
I would not trust slopcoded tax software and I would not trust slopcoded CAD tools in any way.