 So, let me ask you a simple question. How many of you have used LibreOffice? The chances are that if you're a Linux user, that's the only office suit that you would be using. There are so many other office suits that you can use on Linux, but this is the most popular one. And even if you're on Mac OS or Windows, there is a possibility that you have used LibreOffice in subcapacity, you have heard about it, or you're already using it right now, just the way I am using it. I use all three platforms, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows, and I use LibreOffice on all these three platforms. As you know, LibreOffice has been in development for a very long time. I have been actually covering LibreOffice since day one, when it was announced. Actually, if you go to the Document Foundation Viki page, you will find that I am one of the first journalists who talked to them. So I've been writing about it since the very beginning. It's really amazing how much work they have done in all these years, because they inherited a lot of code from OpenOffice, and they kind of modernize all that code and everything, so there's a lot of work. A few days ago, a new version of LibreOffice came out, it's LibreOffice 6.0, and I wrote about it for the Linux Pro magazine. It's an amazing release. I've been using it on my system, and it's kind of, you know, from the UI perspective, it has a ribbon interface. I don't know how many of you like it. I love it, because as a writer, I need quick access to all the tools, so I can very easily choose the tool that I want, and I have this 4K 32-inch monitor, so I don't really care about the space that much. I have ample space there, so I love it. And then there is something called Collabra productivity. I don't know how many of you have heard of it. But it's a UK-based company that creates or sells LibreOffice-based products, and that's what a very common practice in the open source world, you know, where you have a fully open source project, and then you have a commercial offering around that project. So Collabra productivity offers, I think, two products. One is an online suite, which is called Collabra Online, and then they offer a desktop suite, which is based on LibreOffice, so both these versions are based on LibreOffice. So what they do is that they kind of customize a bit for the enterprise customers, and they offer full support and SLAs around these products. So once you get LibreOffice through them as their branded product, you get all the support that you would expect, you know, around an enterprise-grade solution. And a lot of companies and a lot of organizations in Europe, they use it. So I talked to Michael Meeks, he's general manager of Collabra productivity. He has been involved with LibreOffice since very early days, days before that. He has worked with Suzy and all those companies, and then he has been working on this office suite since, you know, very early on, and he has been an open source developer. I love talking to Michael. He's an amazing guy. I met him, I think, twice at Fosdham, and I've known him ever since. And whenever a new release of OpenOffice, and whenever a new release of LibreOffice or Collabra comes out, I always talk to him. So in this interview, we are going to talk about LibreOffice, what's new there, we'll talk about Collabra online and Collabra suite, what's new there, what are the kind of new things that you can expect from the productivity suite, what kind of market is there, and a lot of other things. So without further ado, let's talk to Michael. Michael, before we start this interview, I mean, I have known you for so long, but just for the sake of our audiences, can you quickly introduce yourself to that? What are you doing there? I'm Michael Meeks. I'm a Christian hacker, a Christian husband hacker, something like that. You know, you've got to get these three words in the right order. And yeah, so I spend my time working on LibreOffice primarily. I'm also the general manager of Collabra productivity, which is a subsidiary of Collabra that does, well, I guess, LibreOffice development and tries to drive that. Before that, I was at Novell, and Souza, and Zimian before that doing awesome stuff in the free software desktop. So you know me, Evolution, and of course, OpenOffice back in those days, too. So lots of stuff around office documents as well. Right. Since you mentioned this is totally office script, you know, since you mentioned three things, and I do know, you know, you said Christian hacker and husband, right? I don't know the exact order. But how are these three related? Because I can very easily understand your religion and spiritualism when you mix that with open source. Actually, that's not community, serving help others, helping others. So is there any correctional and husband? Of course, you are taking care of family and open source can be a big family. So, yes, I think it's important to get your priorities and life in a sensible order, isn't it? And so, you know, I think, yeah, so I think I became a Christian in my gap. Yeah, I suppose. And and it was fun because I used to program sort of with stolen compilers. You know, I'd write assemble games and well, yeah, everything was kind of pinched on my machine from the operating system upwards. And it's funny, isn't it? How I don't know, God put his finger on this one thing in my life that was probably irrelevant to anyone else I met. Like, I don't think anyone else I knew was even concerned about copyright, you know, and any of these things at all. But this was the thing and it was a real struggle, like, you know, why? But eventually I switched to this Linux thing. It was just terrible at the time. It was, I don't know, 95, 96 and it destroyed my hardware. I mean, it was it was that bad, you know, like my first hard disk died in some death rows of Linux misdrive or whatever. And there was no games on it. You couldn't write UI. But, you know, anyway, I persisted over time. And, yeah, so I met a whole lot of cool people on whose coattails I have, you know, managed to to write, which is absolutely brilliant. And so my very good for my career. But, yeah, and then, of course, my wife is very, very important to me. You know, she's the power behind the scenes. The thing that makes possible to this. And, yeah, and then I like hacking, I guess. For your name. That's all the holes. OK, good. Yeah, I when I finish my journalism, I joined the Linux for you magazine and I have been like covering Linux open sources my first day of journalism. So I've been doing it over, you know, years. And, you know, as you rightly said, I used to call it beer mode when I drink beer at night and I will know all the time I'll end up formatting my hard drive and my my friend. And the next day we'll try to restore it. Because the thing with Linux is, you know, you are always playing. You're always experimenting. You're always learning new things. So, of course, you know, and you're playing at the hardware or sorry, file system level. So things do get screwed up. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think this is quite one of those quite interesting things where it actually wasn't even the disk. It's not the display that was screwed up. The actual hardware was burnt out by the kernel. You know, like, so the disk no longer functioned, which is which is pretty bad when you were kind of a young student. But anyway, we got past that. And now, you know, when I I continue to cover Linux, but my whole, you know, coverage is also evolved. And now, whenever I go to any enterprise event, it's everywhere is Linux. So my job has become very hard to keep up with all these technologies. And if you look at your side of the aisle, you know, which is, you know, you're building a commercial solution based on LibreOffice. Yeah. So so let's let's start with the LibreOffice 6 was released recently. And and then, you know, you have announced the Collabra Office Suite. It's Collabra Online. That's what it's called, right? What is the name of the product? Yes, yes, absolutely. Collabra Online. Yeah. So how much so what's the new in this release? Can you talk about that? Sure, sure, sure. So I mean, there's just a whole load of things there. And I think what you say about Linux going everywhere is just so true. And I think one of the slightly sad things, I think Karen Sandler was saying this in one of the Oscom keynotes, is that if you look back in the day, in order to use Linux, you had to be some kind of self-semi-masochistic, self-sacrificial person. You know, you were passionate about it because of software freedom and that it was important. And these days, you know, I think there's a very low tolerance for things not working. You know, and oh, well, I have to use a Mac because insert very minor problem that, you know, most of us would have suffered with and helped fix back in the day. It seems a bit of a shame. But yeah, so I think there's a little shallowness now in the open source of a lot that's missing. So, yeah, six zero, LibreOffice six zero. Well, it has lots of cool new stuff in it. So I think. Where do I start? I think one of the problems with LibreOffice is that it's so large that, you know, you can't revolutionize one part of it in, you know, in a single release cycle. But there's some pretty cool things like, so I don't know, the open PGP integration is pretty nice. There's a document rotation there from at CIB as a whole way to open XML improvements. So starting to have a smart art implementation for some of the pieces that hopefully that will evolve. EPUB export is really useful for a whole lot of people that like, you know, the benefits, those open standards, Quark Express. I mean, just another thing that's nice, I guess, is the EMF plus filter. So when you have lots of embedded objects in Word documents, instead of showing you the object, they show you a preview of it because often it can be slow to load the object and render it. So much better show you a preview. But the preview is essentially a Windows API dump of how that would be drawn on Windows, which is called EMF or EMF plus. So the original EMF is just a dump of the GDI calls, I guess, system calls, which comes, GDI is really ancient, like Windows 16 had this, you know, Windows 1.0, you know, I guess started with this GDI rendering API. And then GDI plus is the more recent one. Either way, EMF plus is just a lot better now. So lots of corner cases fixed, much better previews and renderings and so on. But it's quite funny. You have to bring all of that Windows rendering stuff effectively into your platform to be able to show these Microsoft documents. Obviously not ideal from an open standards perspective. But we're getting a lot better than that. Right. So these are the features you're talking about LibreOffice 6.0, right? This is 6.0. Yeah, LibreOffice 6.0. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But but but I'm also curious about what's new in the Culebra. Three point, is it 3.1 or 3.0? Yeah, absolutely. So Culebra 3.0, so Culebra Online is is bringing LibreOffice to your browser, I suppose, and well, more specifically, Culebra Office. And the key things in 3.0 is trying to break this paradox. So at the moment, you can have an online office suite. But if you use it, it's terribly feature pull. So and if you start to look at, for example, Office.com or play with Office 365, you know, there are a whole lot of things you can't do that are really frustrating. And so a lot of these things look like an extended advert for the offline PC version anyway, like you can't do this, try it in the PC version, you can't do this, try it in the PC version. Simple stuff like just editing a chart, you know, like if you if you want to edit a chart and position legends and things, this is just not possible in Microsoft Office online products. See, so what we're trying to do is we're trying to break all of the richness of LibreOffice into your browser. So you don't have to choose. Do I want, you know, online collaboration browser deployment? Or do I want features? You can actually have all of them. So yeah, that's I guess where we're going. And so 3.0 brings a whole load of dialogues there around rich paragraph formatting, rich, rich functionality, you know, in a whole load of areas, you know, rich cell formatting and bringing functions that just not there in the browser elsewhere. If that makes sense. No, that makes perfect sense. So it's a start. We will continue doing this. Those are all well, you know, increasing the amount of service. Yeah, because I was comparing the because there is a demo available that, you know, I was comparing that with Google Docs and Office 365. And of course, you know, it's like kind of you cannot even tell the emotion and sentiments that, you know, you are literally running LibreOffice on, you know, in a cloud in a cloud based environment, because it frees, you know, you from from being attached to a platform, you can move easily. But there was like, as you mentioned, you know, it's like still, you know, there was some lag and there are. So so let's just keep it simple. So when you talk about all these new features and functionalities that, you know, are either coming in LibreOffice, because you are also, you know, I mean, you have been involved with LibreOffice and you're still are versus, you know, Colabra. So how much of these features are actually coming from what users need, because you are compared to LibreOffice community, you actually have being users, you know, you are not just throwing out features, what you think you are, you are you are actually responding to what your customers want. So what kind of what kind of demand or what kind of feature request is there major features that your customers need? We have a case study on Astor Hospital, which is a large hospital in the UK. And they're moving to Colabra office, I guess, Gov Office on their PCs. There's about eight and a half thousand users there. And they're they're saving that they're going to avoid costs of around a million million pounds or so. You can go and read up my slides from the LibreOffice conference. And they have a lot of a lot of interesting problems. So a lot of them interoperability corner cases, you know, their automated system generates open XML in a pre standardization dialect. And hey, we didn't support this, right? So, you know, go support that. So you do or we produce time sheets and the time sheets, you just have to delete any blank rows, because if you don't, when they go into an automated system to get paid, you don't get paid. And, you know, so we have to add permissions that allow people to delete rows, but not, you know, sort of make the permissions more granular. So stuff like that. Another one is amusing is mail merge. And this is a feature in LibreOffice 6. So, you know, I think it's already a bad idea to mail merge from anything isn't a database, right? You should you should store that. And so spreadsheets that some people use spreadsheets for storing their address books. It turns out other people use writer documents like a table, you know, in a word processing document to store their address list. Well, now we can mail merge from those as well. You know, so again, just user user input wanting those features, terminal server optimizations for large businesses that have particular use cases. So yeah, we fix stuff. Obviously, for our customers, we love to delight them. That's what we're here for. And yeah, so lots of our work is, is customer driven, just fast amounts. Right. And you mentioned this hospital. So are they using the online version? Or are they using your other collaborators? They're currently using the PC version. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But we have, we have other hospitals, actually, two hospitals on the continent that aren't approved, you know, they haven't allowed us to, you know, say who they are, that they're actually using, using the collaborative line. Right. Yeah, because as you see, there is a trend going on more and more, you know, people are moving towards the cloud, because now you can have your own private cloud with open stack. So you are, even if you're using cloud, that does not mean you have to give up your control, you can have your own cloud in the, in your own data center. Of course. And that's a huge benefit of collaborate online, you know, continuing to control your server, your data, your network, I mean, all of these things are really quite important to make sure it's not going out of the building. And so for those people who have a real compliance need, I mean, you know, it used to be if you went into a bank and you plugged a device into the network, wasn't known, you know, alarm bells would ring, feet would run, you know, all this sort of thing. And now it seems to be increasingly the case that people don't, they don't even care where the data is, or how they control it. And who shares the machine. So we've seen with the meltdown specter things that it's not just where the data is, it's just who else is running on that same piece of hardware because they can be exfiltrating with data in all sorts of weird ways. So I think just being able to control that and bring that in houses gives you great degree of confidence. Great. Yeah. The adoption of open stack is growing a lot in Europe. And Europe is also one of those, you know, places where you can, you know, think about privacy and all those things are very, very. So with this adoption of, you know, this public private cloud, do you also see growing kind of interest in collaboration online there? Do you see any kind of change in the market? So we see lots of people who are very interested in collaboration online. So we try and partner with people, you know, our preferred approach to market is to go to market with partners. And we have a number of those. We see lots of interest in, you know, you know, the privacy benefits of being able to control your data, partnerships recently with Dell, I think, and a number of other, you know, keep you look at our site. I mean, of course, next cloud in cloud, a PIDOC file will be four of the open source people we partner with. And we, you know, we love to serve those customers and integrate with them. I think there's a whole bit of sort of OEM integrations to where people want a Microsoft office embedded. And they've got some legacy PC version written in VB or something. And then they think about, well, we need to move to the cloud to provide this, you know, much more widely and expand our scope and reduce all those installation problems and so on. But then how are we going to deal with this office piece? And so we see some customers who are like, oh, well, what we want is someone to show us a spreadsheet, select a range, integrate that with our database system and so on. So that's, that's, there's some whole bit of nice use cases there, too, around sort of offices or service, you know, in this, this embedded box that we provide. So from collaborators, you know, as a company's perspective, which is a, like, launch here, like the desktop market or the cloud based? Because you offer both. Sure, we offer both. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think lots of people are interested in the PC piece. And so by, by revenue or by interest, you know. So I think we have to live in the real world there with this. Exactly. That's what I tried to understand, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think there's probably a lot more people interested in the PC, in the online version, obviously as a strategic direction to go in. I think the cloud is very attractive to lots and lots of people. I think from a bread and butter business, you know, in business down the five years doing your office, I think the PC version is still okay. It's still indulging. Although there's an interesting third part of that market where people are using a server use of LibreOffice already. So they're generating documents, they're doing all sorts of automation with it. Okay. And that's another chunk of our business, right? Yeah. So let me talk about desktop space. That's why I wanted to understand so that I can next question could be a piece of that. The thing is that you're literally looking at Microsoft's market. So a lot of people, if they're using Collabora, they have to move their workloads to LibreOffice based solution. And it's not like, you know, you just format the hard drive, install it done. I think it's a process of migration and mindset and everything else. So do you also assist companies in that or they just buy your product and done? Yeah, that's a really good question. Obviously we want to help people migrate in a sustainable way. So they get those cost benefits and they get the minimum of hassle and fuss. And to do that, we have partners. So we partner with a large number of people who are experienced at exactly this. And we try not to get too involved in that process. We can train people to help do that. Of course, the Document Foundation has a certified migration professional scheme as well that can help, you know, give people confidence that they are actually choosing someone's done this before, which is very, very helpful. I think our key recommendation there is to, so when we talk to people, they realize that probably the alternatives are overfeatured for what they want. They understand they need to segment their users and work out who the power users are and who the less power users are. But I think probably the piece they miss is that you should install Collabor Office, Libre Office everywhere. So sometimes they go, oh, well, we'll just install, you know, Collabor Office in this section, but we'll leave Microsoft Office here. The problem then comes with which formats do you interoperate. And before you know it, you're crammed into this, well, Microsoft, you know, world, and you're stuck with this open XML format that is the silhouette of, you know, 35 years of engineering decisions taken over there. It's a real problem. And it's no surprise that it has spikes and bumps around the edge of its shadow, you know. And so this causes grief. So what we really encourage people to do is install Collabor Office everywhere, exchange ODF documents and keep those problematic documents, you know, maybe there's some horrendous HR system that's an integration of Microsoft Office and some VB stuff and sometimes a screen scraping of an HP Arc's mainframe, like we see this in the real world. Keep that guy, but don't don't send the files around. And often we find that the files, the huge accountancy files or, you know, spreadsheet say in Excel are not ones that are mailed to everyone in the company, which sits in the sort of self self isolating into islands, which is great. And so, you know, we see, for example, there's a bank in Italy, the third one of the three biggest banks in Italy. And you know, 20,000 seats of Collabor Office for all of their branch offices, which is great. But then, of course, you know, in their central office, they're still in places using, you know, the alternative. So but that works well with again, huge cost savings. I mean, just very impressive. And the second piece of the same question is that so when somebody buys from subscribes or buys from Collabra, what kind of service do you they actually get, you know, so it depends to some degree what you buy, what we try and encourage people to buy is the product. And that then comes with a whole load of product management integration, they can file as many bugs as they like. But we don't commit to fixing those immediately. If you want to an SLA on those bug fixes, so engineers start working on your issue immediately, we provide that too. But so then, you know, the base product has, you know, security bug fixes, maintenance and so on. And we try to build a relationship with those customers and clearly the big of the customer, the more we put into it. And unlike many other companies, you know, we have an open source mission of Collabra. You know, we want to actually make open source rock. That's basically the focus. So your money goes into improving, you know, Collabra office, Libra office by extension, everything we do goes upstream. So, yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's really, it's really exciting to build that relationship with the customer and improve Libra office in ways that help them. And, you know, just get their, get their feedback, what are the features and the blocking them, where are the problems they see, you know, how we can build that into our plans. It's just exciting. The new version of Libra office is out. Do you also help them in upgrading because it's not because it's a lot of data is attached to of course, of course. So we try and make sure that the new versions, of course, are, you know, backwards compatible and work really well. We tend to ship an enterprise supported version which doesn't come out can aligned with the Libra office schedule. So we, we have an annual schedule for our supported version. So we're still on five three will be moving to six zero sometime early this year, perhaps. But so we do a whole load of extra work on top of that to try and, you know, try and make sure the customers get a very good experience. And yeah, so we do help with that. We also provide MSP patches. So if you're deployed a large windows estate, it's very easy to manage and upgrade and, you know, configure those, which helps people. Right. And do you like, okay, like honestly, do you really think that Libra office or Collabra is really ready for the, I mean, you have a lot of customers who are using it? Do you think it like really, really ready? And why should customers move to to to it instead of using the same age old, which is actually becoming subscription based. So it's also so I mean, we see increasingly large numbers of people doing this. I think often the driver for the PC version is cost saving. I think the online version is much more around privacy and control and service and support and having a real relationship. I think there's a commonality of having a relationship with someone that is interested in your business, values your custom will fix things for you and make, you know, make your life actually a pleasant one. I think it's a bit sad that people get this idea that it is what it is and you have to live with it, you know, because it's software, right? It's infinitely flexible and we can make it better and better. And so we do, you know, so it's great to see that, you know, if this is your top help desk problem. And I like to remember Clippy, you know, the paper clip, which sort of hindered people from from doing their work for months and months and months and removing this thing, turning it off, which was actually not possible in the first releases. It's just a single flag. It's a boolean. It's a compile time check. This should be the very first thing that you do, you know, and that's something, you know, so if there are problems you have, then we can work around them, fix them, reduce your costs, not just of the software, but also the support and services. And one of the things we found is that a lot of people actually would really value a an inflection point where they need to do some training. We're constantly seeing documents produced by experienced professionals that show they don't understand their office suite and actually giving them an excuse to go to a training session and asking silly questions and being shown stuff is actually common to all office suites. I can really improve their productivity and their acceptance of the product. So yeah, I think it's ready. It's ready. Go get it. Capture that when the other people are capturing and get a great relationship. Yeah, I think yeah, because that the how they create, because you know, it's they can create so many ways, but that's also leads to a lot of incompatibility or, you know, issues in the future. So training is, I mean, when you're upgrading or migrating or whatever you're doing, it how you created, you can use a tab or a space or you can do so many different things to. Absolutely. So I think there's some things there just, but I think just having a good understanding of how to quickly use your office suite and to use styles and to format documents that look pretty and you can change how they look and so on. It is a really useful thing. I think if you're generating documents in the Libre Office, they are more likely to be better documents into a great better in both directions. Just because of the subset of the tools we provide, just lean in that direction, quite quite strongly. Right. Now, one more question, while we are still talking about, you know, the desktop market is that, and this could be uncomfortable question, but I've been covering industry for a long time. So it's when is the year of the next desktop swap? No, I know you guys. No, no, no, it's not. Yeah. So the thing is that historically, when we look at open source, it has always been to create alternatives, you know, whether it was Red Hat or whatever it was, you know, there was a big market and what open source does what it commoditizes everything, you know, and it so a lot of people get involved. And for a long time, it was just chasing other, you know, products or, you know, services which are there's a Linux with Unix over it. But now things are changing, like Kubernetes has come out. There was nothing which was like Kubernetes and a lot of innovation nowadays are happening in the open source world, even if companies do work like Google open source TensorFlow, you know, and a lot of things companies do work, they throw it in open source so that, you know, let's let's build it together. So from from Libre office's point of view, are you still chasing Microsoft's market? Or, you know, you are also looking at actually driving ownership when you look, you know, that, you know, this is where people may be heading, you know, 10 let's build something instead of chase. So can you talk about that? Yeah, so it's a really good question. I think in terms of innovation and, you know, being a fast follower versus a leader, you know, there's clearly huge benefits for the second guy on the bike, you know, like the guy at the front is catching the wind and, you know, the guy has a easier ride behind. I think it's easy to look at open source and it's easy to look at the office market and to think that everything goes one way. But actually, I mean, there are some just huge, huge innovations that changing changing the market they've gone completely the other way. So I think, you know, the open XML file format in a zip file, for example, you know, where you can actually start to interact with the document structure and generate things and integrate with other systems in a clean way. It's just a, you know, it's just a it's really revolutionary in terms of document creation and processing. And that's clearly come from, you know, open document format and the, you know, the open source projects that back that you see other things, you know, like remote controls for slide presentations, you know, standing in front of people and using your phone to see what's going on and using this laser pointed song. You see being picked up on the other side, you know, GL transitions, this kind of thing, you know, comes sort of, well, Keynote did some of these things and then LeBron has did some and then Microsoft. So I think there's a sort of kind of a mixing bowl of, you know, ideas and ways people do things. And yeah, so I'm pretty excited. I think there's a lot to do here. A lot of innovation possible. So yeah, I think open source can provide some distinctive advantages here. Yeah, but the thing is you're based on document or creating documents. So what new thing we can do with? Oh, yes. Well, that's also you know, what you think can we do with documents? Well, that is a good question. And so I think there are all sorts of crazy things that we can do. I mean, one of the things collaborators are interested in is virtual reality. I was actually about to talk about because I think your CEO is yeah, Philippe Philippe is CEO, I guess of our parent company, which is which is collaborators doing lots of consultancy for all sorts of awesome stuff across the scenes from you know, in vehicle, you know, car systems through no, don't put document creation in the Tesla's because people will not be driving their car. They will just be working on the spreadsheets. There's a little paint application. I was just watching Jeremy Clarkson use whilst automatic driving. But you know, when you can take your hands off the wheel, why not? Yeah, so yeah, talk about VR. Yeah, you're talking about VR. Yeah. So, you know, the thing is that I don't know what's going to happen in the future. You know, there's so many interface choices coming down on there. One of the things I'm excited about is Missila's deep speech, you know, providing audio input and speech recognition for this kind of application. And that's really awesome because I think as a strategic open source project, you know, we are so suckered into send your voice to the cloud, have a device in your house always listening and pushing speech out. But I think, you know, I'm really thrilled, actually, Missila's putting money into that and making it and encourage people to go and provide their voice. So one of the problems with AI is donating, finding the data sets. These are really expensive. And so often you end up with like a free software implementation that's trivial, you know, it's TensorFlow plus some tweaks. And then there's a big blob of weights that go into this magic brain and it does cool stuff. But how do you get those weights? And so, you know, trying to build open data sets that help people train and learn is really cool. So I mean, I've donated my voice, go and listen to, you know, the speech and they say, you know, please read this thing into the microphone and hey, if you're, you know, listening to this, you could probably do it now and help them build, you know, better models for weird accents like this Cambridge English that comes out of me. So I think that that's a really interesting direction to go in. And I'm really hopeful that we won't have an Amazon Echo and a Google thing and something else all listening to us at once and a Cortana and a, you know, but we can actually have something we can control and lock down and understand and know what's happening with our data. So I think that's one area that I'm excited about. Of course, VR is, you know, I don't know, there are so many directions the computer industry goes in all at once, which will succeed. We have a limited investment capability, but it's communities investment is unlimited in theory. So if you're interested, we want to work on this for making LibreOffice better in any of these areas. Grab me, talk to me. We'd love to help you get working on something cool. Right. From a user's perspective as I also write science fiction and my own, when I look at any productivity suite, whether it's LibreOffice or pages, because I use all platforms just to keep myself updated. I don't want to live in a cave. Very sensible. Yeah. So one thing that I like about Google Docs or MacOS platform is that I can very easily use references or contact, like for example, whether I'm looking at a word, not only just the meaning of the word, but I can, you know, it also opens a snippet from the Wikipedia where I can see what it means. So I think those kind of things, you know, can, you know, then I won't have to leave LibreOffice and go and do research and come back, you know, because it distracts me. So these kind of features, you know, I mean, I'm just thinking that definitely a lot of scope is there, but I think all it needs is the engagement with the actual user's community and people comment. Yeah. And I think those things are key for keeping you in the flow. So when you're editing a document, probably the worst thing you can do is go and look in a web browser because immediately you'll be reading the news, the Twitter, there's something, all right. And you're doomed. I just get one notification and after half an hour I realized that why am I on my phone? I was still not done anything. You know, yeah, I don't know. I didn't know this is a new experience. My father always used to say, oh, 12 o'clock and nothing done, you know, back in the day. But but he was, of course, absorbed in some maths textbook, you know, looking at some, you know, I don't know. Yeah, back in those days when you buy a book, you actually investing in what you are actually these days is so much distraction that in the end, you just end up watching some YouTube video and read some political story which never enriches you. It's just so, yeah. So those kind of feature really cool in, you know, and of course I would love to have a VR where I can, I mean, because I don't want to use this 15 inch or 32 inch screen, you know, when I can just open a dock here in virtual reality, work on it using the virtual keyboard, close the dock and go back to what I'm doing. It will be awesome. That's my like kind of, yeah, I mean, I've never, I think about it. I think, oh, that would be the future. I would really want just to wear some, not Google glasses, but something better. Yeah. Saves buying lots of high res screens if you can take one with you. And I think in terms of the internet of things, it's quite interesting to you in terms of providing, yeah, you know, monitoring and sensor information and you know, you can't put a screen on everything. It's just too expensive, but you can put a little Bluetooth chip in it that can talk to your glasses, isn't it? I think there's a lot of innovation possible there. I like to focus on something and get it to work well and my customers are not currently asking me for. A virtual reality, yes. I know, I know, and I know the innovators dilemma and I know that if I don't do all sorts of awesome things then I'm like, but my hip is that other people in the free software ecosystem will prototype and play with all of these things. Yeah, as little as Torval says, while everybody is looking at the stars, I have to look at the potholes, you know, and see the potholes that should, otherwise you will be just, you know, you cannot keep looking at the stars. Somebody has to fix their road also. So that's the kind of work you are doing, you know, keeping making sure that you have a productivity suit that is working fine without any... Definitely, definitely. And I mean, for all of the talk of tablets and mobiles and all these things, I still think people need keyboards to create content. This is something interesting because initially when I talked to Italo and I was like, oh, we need a version for Android, but honestly speaking, even if I have an iPad Pro, I don't use it to create documents. I always want to go to my laptop or my... It's okay if I'm in a plane and I just want to read a document, but if I really... And reading a document means you have to work on it, you know, so I always prefer either go to my desktop or a laptop. So I think, yeah, I don't think there should be too much focus on that, but desktop version should be totally... I think online version is even more important than mobile version. Yeah, yeah. So I think the online version for a PC user with a keyboard to create content and collaboration. I mean, the collaboration is brilliant. I use collaboration online at times of the day. We do product management ranking in it, in spreadsheets and finance staff and we're often miniting calls together and this little thing. It's nice to share your minutes as you write them so people can check they're not too slanted. And yeah, it's a great tool for that. And that's where the actual competition in the market itself is with the Google Docs or Office 365 where people can control without having... Because cloud offers a lot of flexibility, but it also compromises on your ownership of the data. So with Colabra, you get both the best of both worlds. Yeah. Any other... Ownership control features works. Yeah, exactly. Any other words to wrap it up? Well, what else? Yeah, try it out. Grabcode, it's free. You can get it online. It's really awesome, get involved. Have a play with LibreOffice. Get involved in the community. There's so many things people can do. I mean, just running the latest test builds is useful. Getting involved with filing bugs, de-duplicating other people's bugs, getting better prioritization for the developers, all sorts of stuff. And of course, the simple code tasks too, easy hacks on LibreOffice are a great way to get involved. And then there's some real heavy lifting that can be done too, if you wanna really get involved with the project. So yeah, it's great fun and some good people involved. So yeah, get stuck in. Yeah, I do know a lot of great people who are involved with it. So you don't have to do that. Because I've been monitoring LibreOffice from the day zero before it was announced. I still have on the LibreOffice doc wiki page, that Swapna Bhatia was the first journalist to interview the team. So yeah. Awesome. Well, your support is much appreciated, Swapna. Thank you for your hard work. Yeah, thanks. And keep working on this. And I know I'll be looking forward to the next version of it with all those cool features. And once again, thanks for your time and we'll look forward to meeting you again. Yeah, absolutely pleasure. Well, thanks, Swapna. Bye, guys. Bye. Thanks for watching. I think that was a great interview. As usual, it's always fun to talk to Michael. And I want to say thanks to all of you who have subscribed to this channel, who have joined me on Patreon. If you don't know, a few days ago, I started Patreon channel. And it's not a very big channel. It's very tiny because I have not promoted it at all. I have a lot of contacts, but I have never talked to any of my friends about my Patreon. Because I'm still putting content there. And at the same time, I have some kind of personal issues. Like we had flu and everything. So I'm kind of recovering from that. But a lot of big open source events are coming up. And that's where I'll be promoting this Patreon. 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