“LibreOffice is at serious risk”
The LibreOffice project&#x27;s imprimatur should be to stop existing.  This isn&#x27;t
facetious or snark.  Make it a long-term goal—let&#x27;s say 15 years.<p>The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end.
The web has its shortcomings, so it&#x27;s easy to see why people opt for MS
Office-based workflows, but the end goal should be to wean businesses off
contemporary word processors and raise a generation of kids who aren&#x27;t taught to
write essays in Microsoft Word or any other office suite that resembles the
ones we see today.  A standardized &quot;Markdown for the Web&quot; (or AsciiDoc) with
native browser support would be a good 80&#x2F;20 start and would move things out
of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text.  Users themselves
need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like
most don&#x27;t know that HTML is plain text—because they usually aren&#x27;t even aware
of HTML in the first place.  (Besides word processing, spreadsheets are a
whole other larger problem that can be handled once there&#x27;s traction on this
front.)<p>Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse
incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document
creation, editing, and (let&#x27;s face it: email-based) distribution.<p>The failure of standards bodies and browser developers to address the real
needs of MS Office customers should not be discounted.  Heck, even EPUB which
is largely (X)HTML isn&#x27;t even really Web-native, and that&#x27;s a total failure on
the part of browser makers.<p>It might be prudent for the commercial companies associated with LibreOffice
to stop thinking of themselves as vendors of an MS Office alternative and
start thinking of themselves as a group who can see where the puck should be,
and then move both the Web and businesses+classrooms there, too—and capitalize on being the first mover.<p>NB: Re-inventing the office suite as a web app (à la Google Docs) is <i>not</i> the
kind of thing I&#x27;m talking about.