Comment 1862 for bug 1

Just this week, a corporate customer with whom I am starting a business relationship sent me a ms word document with a form that I needed to fill in order for them to register me as a supplier.

Needless to say, I had to use ms word to open it. I tried to do it in libreoffice but all the layout was messed up, and I didn't want to return my customer a messed up document. Also, the document had a field that was a digital signature, and libreoffice didn't recognize it properly.

As many people do, I used to have a windows partition just for cases like this. However, a few months ago my HDD failed and I decided to replace it with a SSD. With space being much more limited on SSD, I decided there was no use in having Windows around anymore.

So ... I had to send the documents to my wife and ask her to open them up in windows+office and fill them up. Fortunately, she is also an executive in the company and was legally allowed to digitally sign those papers. Otherwise, I would have had to install a digital signature certificate of myself, in somebody else's computer, and I wouldn't have liked that.

I know that some will say that they would have told the customer to send the document in a non-proprietary format. Yeah, right. I would like to see you tell that to a new customer with an important deal.

Probably others will also tell me that there were ways to cimcurvent this and still do it from Linux by using certain programs/commands/hacks. That doesn't matter, because even if I were able to do it, your average user wouldn't.

So, if you only care about the consumer+mobile world, then probably we could say this bug is fixed. But if you care about professionals, who mainly use personal computers for work, this bug is far from being fixed.

Don't get me wrong. I agree that there has been an advance in some areas and I cheer for that. But that is no reason to give a blind eye to the areas where we haven't advanced.