This is unironically a huge issue, and it’s just fascinating how the psychology of pricing and valuation works.

Semi-large company needs something. They make a budget for €100k and start looking at different alternatives. They find alternatives a) €120k, b) €80k, c) €15k. I bet you they’ll try to ask their superiors to expand their budget in order to buy the premium €120k solution, and they will not in any way consider the €15k one.

Come to think of it, it goes beyond software as well.

My biggest issue with PDF it’s hard to read on screens. On top of that PDF forms are notoriously buggy, tables are almost impossible to machine-read without specialized software, and even copy-pasting can be a hassle.

I get that print will continue to be a thing to some extent, but I don’t think that business or government documents need to be typeset with static pages. I think it’s time we move on to a much simpler standard that is made for free-flowing text.

PDF has also been problematic as a standard format, since it referred to proprietary features up until 2023.

Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.

It’s silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it’s ironic that it’s because they don’t know how to code, but here we are.

Digital sovereignty. Even Europe is looking at replacing Windows now. I know that attempts have been made before, but there are stronger pressures now and there are better alternatives for Windows-only workflows.

Most new apps are web based nowadays. Many companies are even ditching the desktop Office apps now (which is insane for its own reasons, but still). Engineers under 40 prefer Python over Excel. Word is good for WYSIWYG printing, but with a small government program it should be possible to make that irrelevant quickly and ditch PDFs along with it.

I’m hopeful.

The best thing to do is just start with whatever you already have. An old gaming rig, laptop or Raspberry Pi, doesn’t matter. Each will present some technical obstacle that you need to overcome (for example keeping the laptop going when the lid is closed). That’s part of learning.

Self-hosting is a hobby where we gradually learn more. Experimentation is just as important as reading the docs.