The past, present and future of office suites
Summary
The office suite market is large, profitable and growing, and this attracts new entrants: low-cost clones, open-core products and, more recently, suites built largely with artificial intelligence. Most of them compete on price and on native support for OOXML, a format whose evolution remains in practice under Microsoft’s control.
When features can be reproduced cheaply, what distinguishes a suite is who governs the document format and the software, and therefore who controls the content. This is the question of digital sovereignty, and its outcome will depend partly on political decisions, and partly on software features.
The 1980s and 1990s
The office suite sector emerged in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s, when Microsoft Office established itself as the leading product, with a market share of over 90% according to Microsoft unofficial statements at their events.
Some may remember the main competitors: Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office and StarOffice, the ancestor of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Fewer will recall Anywhere Office, Ability Office, Pro PC Suite 2001 and ThinkFree Office. Ability Office still exists, and ThinkFree Office is now called Hancom Office.
By the end of the century Microsoft Office dominated the sector, while all other products had a barely noticeable market share or had disappeared altogether.
The sector has always been lucrative: the products meet a universal need, while development and sales costs are low relative to volumes, so margins are potentially extremely high. For this reason all the major software vendors tried to enter the market, and the first clones emerged, competing solely on price.
Market presence, however, was just one of the factors contributing to success. Other factors were bundling with the Windows operating system, lock-in through document formats and pricing.
The two decades between 2000 and 2020
Sun Microsystems, which had acquired StarOffice, released its source code in 2000, and OpenOffice.org 1.0 followed in 2002: the first FOSS suite to reach a mass audience. Version 1.0 offered only a glimpse of the suite’s potential, and version 1.1 was usable but still limited. Only version 2.0, released in 2005, made OpenOffice a genuine competitor to the market leader.
For several years the rivalry between the proprietary suite and the FOSS suite played out on two fronts: large migration projects and document formats.
At the time, migrations seemed to signal an irreversible trend, but this proved an illusion. Microsoft deployed all its commercial muscles and started to talk to politicians. Since 2012, the company has been one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Brussels (based on data from Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobby Facts).
The battle over file formats was most prominent between 2006, when ODF was standardised by ISO/IEC, and 2008, when the proprietary OOXML format was standardised through a process we have already described in a previous blog post and will not revisit here.
In 2010, following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, the community created The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. In 2011, Oracle was effectively forced to donate the OpenOffice.org source code to the Apache Software Foundation in order to honour a contract – due to expire in 2014 – that IBM had signed with Sun Microsystems, and which allowed it to use the OpenOffice.org source code whilst disregarding the open-source licence.
The format battle then faded into the background, as IBM decided to abandon the ODF advocacy project at OASIS to use the money to fund the development of Apache OpenOffice and fight the growth of LibreOffice. It resurfaced in 2024 with the concept of digital sovereignty and the announcement of several large scale migrations to open source software, such as the German province of Schleswig-Holstein and the Austrian Army.
Between 2010 and 2020 the sector also evolved with the arrival of cloud-based suites, which started a new battle for market share between Microsoft and Google. Given the sector’s renewed growth, a new generation of clones emerged: programs that are almost always limited in functionality, copy the market leader and compete on licence cost.
Some of these clones, in order to disguise their commercial operation, release a basic version under an open-source licence, often modified so as to prevent forking. Such a licence no longer meets the Open Source Definition, and the product is in practice freeware, while the full-featured version is sold separately (the “open core” model).
Naturally, these programs support the OOXML format natively, because they aim at a low-cost replacement, not at migration, that is, a paradigm shift that would give users full control over the software and its content.
By digital sovereignty we mean the ability of a user or institution to control its documents and software: to open documents with any implementation, to fork the code, and to choose where data is hosted and who operates the service.
OOXML is formally an ISO standard, but its reference implementation remain with Microsoft. As long as this is the case, Microsoft retains control over the content: the user saves money, but sacrifices digital sovereignty.
The current situation
The reason for the renewed interest in the office suite market lies in the size of the market itself, which is worth tens of billions of dollars and therefore whets the appetite of software companies. Even a 1% market share is worth a very significant sum, sufficient to justify the investment.
As a reference point, we use public data from the “Office Productivity Software Market Report 2026” by Business Research Company, a US-based market analysis firm. The office productivity software market reached $50.73 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow to $81.83 billion by 2030, at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 10.1%.
We add some figures relating to Microsoft and Google.
Microsoft 365 Commercial generated $102 billion in fiscal year 2026, an increase of 16%. Paid licences for Microsoft 365 Copilot exceeded 30 million by the end of June 2026, which on analyst estimates is about 6 to 7% of the paid commercial user base.
Google Workspace is estimated to have over 3 billion users and over 11 million paying customers. The user figure includes free Gmail accounts, so it is not comparable to Microsoft’s paid subscriptions.
Technographic data from 6sense, another US-based market research firm, attributes 50.34% of the office productivity category to Google Workspace and 45.46% to Microsoft 365 (figures are based on corporate domains). Measured in corporate licences and revenue, Microsoft is clearly in the lead.
According to 6sense, 64% of organisations use both suites. This figure is only indicative, but it points to an increasingly widespread overlap between office suites, which is not limited to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. For LibreOffice, based on hands-on experience with large organizations, we estimate that 50% of users also use another office suite, depending on their needs.
We are therefore talking about a market of enormous economic value, and these figures refer almost exclusively to licences, not to the ecosystem. If we include value added consultancy services, which are a necessary component of every implementation in public bodies and companies, the total is likely to be significantly higher.
Analysts do not provide precise data on this, so we rely on a rough estimate based on experience: value-added services are worth about 25% of the value of licences. On the analysts’ forecast, the 2030 market would then be worth about $102 billion ($81.83 billion plus 25%). One percentage point of market share is therefore worth $1 billion a year to a commercial vendor.
This figure does not accrue to free software, but it explains the incentive for new entrants. It also explains the emergence of a new type of office suite: so-called “clones” developed largely with artificial intelligence.
At present we remain extremely cautious about the use of artificial intelligence in software development, but we recognise that views differ, and we are monitoring the evolution of these applications closely.
The strategic consequence does not depend on that debate: if the cost of reproducing a feature set collapses, features stop being the main barrier to entry. What remains is the governance of the format and of the code, the strength of the community, and the long-term maintenance of the software.
A glimpse into the future of office suites
Over the last twenty years we have read contradictory forecasts: the total disappearance of the sector, or only of the desktop suite, and the opposite, a strong growth driven by announcements of new operating systems, software paradigms or hardware platforms.
One thing is certain: the office suite market has gone through periods of slight contraction, probably normal fluctuations, but overall it has grown, and in our opinion it will continue growing for the foreseeable future.
Today, the installed base consists of around 2 billion desktop and laptop computers, based on active devices reported by manufacturers, plus devices that nobody counts because they are second- or third-hand, found mainly in poorer countries that are overlooked by technology usage statistics.
The integration of AI assistants into the suites adds a further dimension. With more than 30 million paid Copilot seats, Microsoft has shown that there is a market for it.
Overall, this is an extremely interesting potential market, where there is room for all types of office suites, desktop and cloud-based, and for all development strategies. On the other hand, success is not just related to number of users as there are market dynamics which depend on political decisions that go beyond the value of the software itself.
However, the location where documents are processed – whether locally or in a provider’s cloud – and the ability of artificial intelligence tools to read and write in open formats remain issues linked to the question of sovereignty. We have already expressed our views on these matters in several blog posts: nothing should interfere with the user’s right to decide on their own content.
LibreOffice will continue to be a key player. Downloads and donations grew substantially in 2026 (as of 31 October, downloads +26% and donations +44 in term of numbers), which reflects a steady improvement in the quality of the software and in the reputation of the project.
The practical conclusion is that LibreOffice and ODF compete on a different axis from the clones: not feature parity at a lower price, but open governance of the format and of the code.
