memes

I really think it is just the last one. I would argue that any features which are truly exclusive to Microsoft Office are so niche that they absolutely do not warrant holding back an organizational migration. The vast majority of people are perfectly happy using Google Docs for word processing and simple spreadsheets. For these tasks, any office suite is suitable. The handful of employees doing highly complex workflows in Microsoft Office can be issued machines suitable for the task (though I guarantee they are doing something stupid in Excel which should be done using a database system if anybody in the company gave a shit about investing in their IT infrastructure instead of just letting the accounts receivable clerk invent it whole-cloth in return for a standard performance review and 3% annual raise). Same thing goes for people developing iOS applications (for internal use or for clients and end-users), they get a Mac workstation to run XCode on, obviously. These accommodations can be made without the whole organization depending on using a specific platform. Technological necessity does not explain why they just run Windows and Office on everything they can.

As far as hardware compatibility goes, these PCs should be treated as part of the appliance. If you have something like an RFID badge printer which is only supported on Windows, it obviously gets Windows machine to use as a terminal. Any modestly sized company with an IT staff has a closet full of old laptops and micro-ATX towers perfectly suited for this purpose. There's no need to reverse engineer the device. You can just stick an Intel NUC next to it and use it as intended, in compliance with the EULA and with the warranty intact. If you have an embedded system based on Windows (as various forms of industrial machinery do), obviously you leave that alone, because the vendor won't service the machine otherwise. For most office workflows though, dedicated hardware should not be a concern. Again, these decisions aren't being made out of technical necessity, but because everybody in the 90s was sold on the idea that if they didn't learn how to write formulas in Excel they would end up operating a deep fryer for eternity - so now it is an abundant and replaceable skill.

Then again, all of that is rendered completely meaningless when your AI-coded OS can just simply self-destruct any given second. But yeah, I get what you're saying.