There's definitely a significant niche for offline word processor, spreadsheet, drawing diagrams and such. I do not want to go online, register, have my data "in the cloud", fume when it goes down because of AWS of buggy update, lose it when the company decides to fold, etc. I want to fire up an application on my local, edit it there, and save it on my local. If I need collaboration, well, there's plenty of tools for that.
But I'm old and my 14yo son never saw even MS Word (leave along LibreOffice) until I showed it to him, they do everything in Google Docs and that's all they know. So maybe I'm part of a dying breed :-)
I am not sure that online collaboration is such a killer feature.
Most of the time I would take a good offline office app over the application that requires an internet connection, stores my data in the cloud and forces its design choices, from the UI to the security, down my throat "because of the way cloud apps work". My 2c.
To add onto this, I have been using Libreoffice Online or Collabora Online for the last 4 years or so. I used to compile LOOL myself but eventually I just switched over to using the Collabora Online Development Edition that Collabora releases. I am using it integrated with Nextcloud.
I enjoy using it and it has been a life savior for the times I need to work on a document with someone else since I can just send them a share link for it. The fact that it uses leaflet which is meant for maps does mean that the latency to the server matters quite a lot to experience but I don't mind that much, personally, with my not great 120ms RTT to my server.
Hey - thanks for using Collabora Online (COOL) - we're doing a chunk of work to accelerate interactive editing, and lots of that starts to land in 22.05 - time-based document change compression (deltas), improved JS, reduced latency of event handling (particularly in the browser where handling websockets related to rendering & the DOM is a bit too 'exciting') - with lots of wins recently. Hopefully you can enjoy them in our next release coming soon.
What I'd really like is on office suite that lives on my own device (e.g. my router), where I own my data. That's not the way the world went, but c'est la vie.
Synology has a full Google Drive replacement with apps built-in.
I think the fact that I'm The first person to mention it here, and the fact you didn't find it yourself, is revealing about the true level of demand for such a product.
Of course, there's no way to try it or to buy it from there....
I see random devices for sale for under $200, but I'm not sure if they include it. If I bought it, I'm not sure how well it works.
We have no idea of the level of demand for a product that well-hidden. The fact I just spent 5-10 minutes without figuring trying to figure this out without success means we have no idea.
As a footnote, I do have a random machine running a random online office suite. It works, but not well enough to be generally usable.
What if you could host it on your laptop or a server you pay for?
When I suggested something a company could host I imagined it replacing Office 365 or Google Docs (a concern governments may have about having American companies host their data). Being able to self host and allow collaboration without relying on a third party application is important.
Honestly I hate online office tools. They encourage a collaboration model that just doesn't work for me _at all_ - and yet is, by now, _the standard_.
I'd much rather send documents back and forth, with comments I integrate with the material. If I _need_ to do something live, plain text is actually not just perfectly sufficient - it's either _exactly_ what I want, or what I want is a white board (and therefore please let's just use self-hosted Excalidraw - but remember to sponsor it if you're commercial!).
But outside of very rare occasions, let's just set up a plain old mailing list, write proposals in basic text, and then once we have something complete, let one person integrate the whole thing into a single pretty document with like LaTeX or Markdown or something. Or even Word, I don't really care.
And yes, that's hostile to brainstorming. Good. I too am hostile to brainstorming.
What would it take to make LibreOffice a web-centric app companies could host themselves? Maybe Apache's resources could be directed that way.