You are dumping problems related to MS (well known) monopolistic behaviour. Office format has been notoriously hard to replicate (on purpose). That is not a failing in Open Source, it is a failing of Microsoft.
I realize that businesses must run daily operations and that requires them to bite the bullet and pay the "Microsoft tax". A municipality should think a bit about if some operational problems have a price tag of 90 million euros annually.
Yes, you are right, and it is good that they though about that and tried the alternative. But I still think the issue of LO not able to read MS documents is a real problem.
Like for example my sister. Her husband works for Redhat so he enthusiastically installed Linux on her notebook, LO and everything. She worked as a professional writer, and it was a real struggle... some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them... then spell-checker wasn't as good as in MS Word (non-English language), etc. The cost of this solution was quite high, and she eventually gave up and installed Windows.
I am not trying to trash Linux or LO, it would be great to have open-source alternatives to everything, but in certain areas (Office, Adobe products, etc), such alternative doesn't exists and fighting against reality doesn't make it.
> some documents she received wasn't readable, then they couldn't read some document she sent them
Which is survivable if your time has no value. If you're paying people serious wages to do this stuff, the costs are dramatically higher than just buying Windows and Office.
When I was in the full-time editing business, sending me unreadable documents more than once would not be a good way to get further commissions.
Specifically, someone on $50,000 a year is earning roughly $25 per hour. Putting them through the painful time-wasting problems of dangerously semi-compatible software is a huge waste of money.
Office 365 easily pays for itself in saving a few minutes per day.
Any evidence for this? I specifically remember one article talking about Excel's file format that was engineered in a way as to run on extremely resource-limited computers - those available when office was first released. Any complexities had to be built on top of that legacy base, and be backwards compatible.
That seems to more than explain the file-format complexity, without unsubstantiated allegations of deliberate obfuscation.
I realize that businesses must run daily operations and that requires them to bite the bullet and pay the "Microsoft tax". A municipality should think a bit about if some operational problems have a price tag of 90 million euros annually.