Two decades ago, an ad hoc coalition of major companies (mostly acting behind the scenes), open source developers, and technology freedom advocates led an effort to challenge Microsoft for control of the desktop. The weapon at their disposal was the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a new standard that promised to allow documents, spreadsheets and presentations to be traded between competing software programs for the first time. After several heroic years, that quest eventually failed, but a new one may be taking shape today, with its seeds planted in Denmark – or perhaps in Greenland.

The new effort, as reported in the Danish press, involves the decision of Copenhagen and Aarhus, the first and second largest Danish cities, to move off Microsoft Office and onto competing productivity solutions. The reasons given are concerns that political turmoil in the United States could result in Office services becoming unavailable, and that personal data hosted in the United States might not be secure.

With 44,000 employees, Copenhagen represents a significant business customer. That’s about the same number of desktops that were scheduled to convert in the Executive Agencies of the Massachusetts state government in 2003, sparking what turned into a years-long standards war. And despite Microsoft’s massive revenue growth and its diversification into cloud hosting since then, Office is still its largest per-product revenue producer, accounting for $54.8 billion out of a total of $245 billion in Microsoft revenues in 2024.

Whether the decision of two Danish cities represents the beginning of a movement or only a blip on the desktop screen remains to be seen. But it does occur against the backdrop of a multi-year effort by the European Union to protect its data security, defend its digital sovereignty, and figure out how to regain market share in information technology products and services against the continuing onslaught of U.S. giants. The possibility of a new challenge to Office also gains credibility from the fact that a similar movement has taken root and spread before, although it was ultimately unsuccessful. But that failure was largely due to the very significant efforts Microsoft made to protect its franchise. With the passing of the torch to Satya Nadella, the software giant never mounted a similarly forceful, immune response to the successful spread of Google Docs.

All of which raises the question of whether a new movement to challenge Office could succeed today. The answer will naturally lie in part on what has changed since the early aughts, and what remains the same.

Back in 2003, a number of major technology companies, including Google, IBM, Motorola and Oracle actively supported ODF. And there were available alternatives to Office, most notably an open source office suite called OpenOffice from which ODF had been abstracted. In the years that followed, an epic battle unfolded between ODF, developed by the standards organization OASIS, and an alternative file format, called OOXML, developed by Microsoft. Both were ultimately adopted by the ISO/IEC JTC-1, the predominant traditional, global host for information technology standards development.

One impediment to success was the fact that Sun Microsystems (and later Oracle), which controlled OpenOffice, did not make the investment in that program needed to make it a feature by feature alternative. Nor did companies such as IBM support OpenOffice development as it might have. More critically, Microsoft delayed for as long as possible implementing ODF in Office and didn’t ensure that Office could reliably swap documents with OpenOffice users with formatting and features preserved intact. Microsoft also lobbied aggressively against ODF everywhere that it might threatened to a foothold.

Despite these handicaps, ODF did make some inroads in countries such as Germany, Portugal and Brazil. Most visibly, the City of Berlin converted its 50,000 desktops to ODF. But over time the movement lost energy and the potential for broad adoption evaporated.

Fast forward to 2025, and what do we see?

OpenOffice is no longer supported, but a fork called LibreOffice is, relying on an active open source community. Google Docs has found success among enterprise users, in part due to its emphasis on collaboration. It was an early adopter of ODF and still supports the format.

Meanwhile, innovation in Office has been slow (after thirty years, it still lacks the ability to track changes in PowerPoint), but it remains dominant. In recent years, it’s support of ODF has even improved, perhaps in response to the increasing penetration of Google Docs in the enterprise. Apple iWork arrives free of charge on Mac devices, but Apple’s desktop market share remains limited (although slowly growing). OpenOffice itself (now hosted by the Apache Foundation) is largely dormant, and alternatives like Notion and Canva, aren’t really comparable in functionality.

Given that a move to Google Docs or iWork would merely involve moving from one U.S. incumbent to another, LibreOffice is the obvious choice for anyone seeking a safe haven away from the effects of U.S. political policies and turmoil. And Microsoft Office does still support export of documents in ODF, although Word itself warns users seeking to save work in ODF that a document “may contain features not compatible with this format.” This matters because anyone moving to an ODF-based system may need to exchange documents with users who use Office – in other words, for now, with just about everyone else.

The fact that many have already moved to Google Docs is encouraging, as is the fact that Microsoft, no longer the scrappy street fighter of the Gates/Ballmer days, has not confronted the rise of that program in the same way it defended its turf against earlier ODF-based products. Moreover, the ability of open source communities to compete head to head with proprietary developers is now an established fact.

Still, switching from one office suite to another is a significant undertaking for any enterprise. Even in Europe, it’s not likely that there will be a broad move to follow the example of Copenhagen and Aarhus absent a consensus decision to take this fork in the road and bring increasing support to The Document Foundation, which supports LibreOffice.

Will that happen? A lot depends on how the Trump administration unfolds. If it quickly reaches agreement with the European Union on a mutually satisfactory trade deal and raises fewer concerns in general across the Atlantic, the renewed prospects of ODF will likely recede again into the background. If not, perhaps the Danish cities will be seen in the rearview mirror of history to have been in the vanguard of the first and only successful challenge to Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop.