For those trying to work out an alternative, I've found OnlyOffice desktop to be pretty good – it's quite similar to the Microsoft products, and fully compatible, but free.
That's specifically what I'm working on at Unternet [1], based on observing the same issue while working at Adept. It seems absurd that in the future we'll have developers building full GUI apps that users never see, because they're being used by GPU-crunching vision models, which then in turn create their own interfaces for end-users.
Instead we need apps that have a human interface for users, and a machine interface for models. I've been building web applets [2] as an lightweight protocol on top of the web to achieve this. It's in early stages, but I'm inviting the first projects to start building with it & accepting contributions.
Unternet (https://unternet.co) is a building a new, intelligent client for the web. We think a pivotal part of this is an open protocol for rich, AI-native apps, that everyone can build on and implement. We're a new startup, backed by Betaworks and Mozilla, and looking for our first hires.
We're looking for:
* Lead designer (full-time) – to create the next generation of interfaces
* Lead engineer (full-time) – to build the foundations of a new client for the web
* Open-source engineer (full-time, part-time or contract) – to steward our community & open-source efforts
For those interested, I've been working on something related to this, Web Applets – which is a spec for creating AI-enabled components that can receive actions & respond with state: