I hope they keep it this time, I’m tired of seeing these, and then “oh, MS gave us a great deal soooo”
I think they were always on a smaller scale. With this one, I’m somewhat hopeful that it’ll stick, and be a long term effort.
committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments
Machine translation of the linked German article:
Decision 2025/06
The IT planning council finds that open exchange formats are necessary for the nationwide cooperation and welcomes the decision of the Digital Minister Conference. Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the way to more digital sovereignty and innovations.
The IT planning council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly being used in public administration and will become the standard for document exchange by 2027. He commissioned the standardization board with the implementation.
The IT planning council also recognizes that the exchange of documents by e-mail is no longer up to date for the preparation and follow-up of conferences for the preparation and follow-up. He commissioned the Fitko to present a concept for providing a collaboration solution up to the 48th session.
This is a big thing actually. Although the phrasing still sounds a bit vague to my ears: “The IT planning council is committed to ensuring that open formats (…) will become the standard for document exchange by 2027” is not the same as “Open formats will become the standard for document exchange by 2027”…
Infuriating that this isn’t the standard everywhere.
Surprised the EU hasn’t looked into it, even. The default behaviour to use proprietary MS formats is clearly intended to damage competitors by reducing compatibility.
I’d call that a textbook case of abuse of dominant market position. How is it any different to Google doing crap like preferring their own products in Google searches?
good. can’t wait for places to send me an odf text document instead of word.
Or even better, PDF
thats what I send to places if they don’t dictate something first.
In 20 years then. All the custom-built software that is alteady 10 years out of date is built with Microsoft ptoducts as a hard requirement. Replacing that costs money. And if conservative governments hate one thing it’s spending money on something that won’t benefit their lobbyists.
It’s time to replace that old crap
Conservative government?
Absolutely
Weird, how they suddenly can do when it finally matters. National security more important than coffers of money, huh?
I don’t think this decision was made because of Trump’s policies. There were already decisions like this before Trump was in office. Unfortunately, nothing has really been effective enough to force Microsoft out of public administration.
