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On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021. No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset — and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription. This is not a bug in the model. It is the model. Support that does not expire LibreOffice has no end-of-support date, because there is no vendor with the power to declare one. The code is public. The development is community-driven and foundation-governed. When a release cycle closes, the next one is already available, free, to everyone — not to those who renewed. The distinction matters more than it appears. Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: the date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licences into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it. Ownership of documents, not just access to them A support deadline is the visible layer. Underneath it sits something more consequential: the format your

Earlier in this series I described the invisible architecture of lock-in as three stacked layers. A document depends on its format, which depends on a rendering engine to become visible, which depends on the fonts that give it its final shape. Each layer is a dependency the user rarely sees and almost never chooses deliberately, and together they explain why “just open it in something else” so often fails. The argument has always been structural rather than moral: it does not matter whether the vendor is benevolent or predatory, because the dependency exists either way. Two pieces of news from late June give me occasion to extend that architecture. They are not, at first glance, about formats at all. But read structurally, they reveal two further layers of dependency that sit on top of the technical ones. Layers I left implicit until now because the technical case was enough to make the point. It is worth making them explicit, because they complete the account of what dependency actually means. The first piece of news: Microsoft has extended free security updates for Windows 10 by a further year, to October 2027. The original end date for consumer support was October 2026.