Its default file format is still Microsoft's. So is the lock-in.
Europe just declared independence from Microsoft. Every document it creates is still written in Microsoft's language.
On June 9, a consortium led by IONOS and Nextcloud launched Euro-Office: an open-source office suite, think Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but European, self-hosted, and built as a sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365. The pitch is digital sovereignty. The backing is serious. The timing, with governments across Europe actively leaving Microsoft, is perfect.
Two storms have shadowed the project since development began. The code was forked from OnlyOffice, a suite with deep Russian roots, and that fork triggered a license fight over the AGPL that has run for months. Both are real concerns. I wrote about the license trap a few weeks ago. Both are also the loud, obvious fight.
The quieter detail is the one that actually decides whether any of this delivers sovereignty. By default, Euro-Office saves your documents in OOXML, Microsoft's format. Not ODF, the open standard that belongs to no single company.
Here is why that matters more than the headlines. The specification for Microsoft's OOXML runs to roughly 7,000 pages. ODF, the open standard it competes with, fits in under a thousand. That gap is not detail, it is purpose. ODF was designed from a clean slate by a committee of competing vendors. Most of OOXML's pages exist to preserve Microsoft's own past, bugs and archaic quirks included. A specification that large is effectively impossible to implement perfectly, and no one outside Microsoft ever has. The company that wrote the format stays the only authority on what your documents actually say.
And here is the part most people miss. You can tell your own staff to switch the default to ODF tomorrow. It changes almost nothing. A file format is not a personal preference, it is a shared language. Every document you receive from a ministry, a supplier, a court is still written in Microsoft's format, so you save in it to send it back, and the gravity holds. One organization flipping a setting does not move a market. The default is the market.
So you can move every server to Europe. You can fork every line of code. You can put a European flag on the login screen. And if the documents themselves are still written in Microsoft's format, Microsoft still defines the thing your data is made of. You have changed the landlord, not the lease.
This is the lesson that keeps repeating, and I keep coming back to it. Sovereignty is not just where your software runs. It is who controls the format your data is written in. A launch built to escape Microsoft, defaulting to Microsoft's format, is proof of exactly that.
The frustrating part is that Europe already solved this. LibreOffice and Collabora are both European, and both are built on the open standard by default. The sovereign option was never missing. It was just less convenient.
Which leaves one question for anyone funding this shift: are you buying independence, or the feeling of it?
