Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US Government contract

Instead, the government should fund competition to lower prices. It seems like Office is still the default for everyone and it’s not really possible for anyone to hire thousands of engineers for a decade or two to compete with them. There’s no functioning competition for a product like this.

Google, Apple, and various, other open and closed sourced alternatives exist for nearly everything in Office. Many of them have been under development for decades by companies that are similar in magnitude to Microsoft.

Lack of competition is definitely a problem in the pricing of some things, but I don’t think this is one of them, people just prefer what Microsoft offers and are willing to pay for it.

LibreOffice, in the most primordial form, has been developed since 1985. It's older than Linux.

To be honest though, would I use it for my business? No. Broken formatting (for either my side or a client's side) isn't acceptable; the UI is two decades behind; LibreOffice Calc is still too incomplete; and who knows what's in a C++ codebase that old and that large (100,000+ files, 10M+ LoC) - it's basically security by obscurity. Microsoft Office getting hacked and fixed, is better than a target too small to matter until a government adopts it.