On the first working day after the Chinese New Year holidays, DeepSeek's code repository saw a frenzy of updates. Among the numerous technical commits, a seemingly inconspicuous yet profoundly significant PR (Pull Request) caught my eye: DeepSeek is actively integrating with OpenOffice.

As a veteran IT professional and CIO who has navigated the enterprise IT industry for years, my immediate reaction upon seeing this news was: Microsoft's real trouble might finally be here.

01 Why OpenOffice?

For those outside the tech circle, OpenOffice is the open-source "alternative" to the Microsoft Office suite, covering core productivity applications like Word and PowerPoint. Not only is it completely ad-free, but as an open-source software, it can be used directly for commercial purposes.

In fact, when setting up a personal computer for my father, I neither purchased the expensive Microsoft Office nor installed WPS (which offers free basic features but is heavily cluttered with ads). Instead, I installed LibreOffice, another excellent branch of OpenOffice. In the realm of basic office productivity, open-source solutions have long achieved extremely high usability.

02 Suffering from Microsoft: The Nightmare of Enterprise IT

In recent years, Microsoft has enjoyed immense glory in the tech world, unrivaled in its ability to shout slogans, coin concepts, and paint grand visions. But when it comes to actual software implementation (such as Teams and Windows 11), the user experience has been nothing short of a disaster.

As the CIO of a small-to-medium enterprise, I've had the thought of completely ripping and replacing Microsoft's Office and Teams suites countless times over the past couple of years. This isn't necessarily because other software on the market is flawless, but rather because the quality of Microsoft's heavily promoted "NEW" series of software has become an endless nightmare for enterprise IT departments.

The myriad of bugs across every workflow and the consistently clunky core features leave IT departments constantly putting out fires, often unable to solve substantive problems for the enterprise—all while companies are forced to pay exorbitant subscription fees.

03 Hidden Worries Beneath the Glamour: The Copilot Bubble and the Twilight of Heroes

Microsoft is, after all, a tech giant that created massive brilliance in the PC era. The market and investors view it through thick rose-colored glasses, making it difficult for them to realize in the short term that its rapidly depleting "product capability" is deeply damaging the company's intrinsic value.

Previously, precisely because Microsoft pitched the grand concept of Office Copilot, the stock market rejoiced, believing it had found the perfect, highly monetizable use case for AI Large Language Models. But the cruelty of business lies here: If a company loses its ability to polish excellent products, no matter how loud the slogans or how great the ideas, returning to actual product execution will only bring multiplied disappointment to users.

Isn't the essence of a company's market capitalization built on continuously delivering great products to maintain, realize, and elevate investors' expectations of its profit prospects?

As an IT veteran who has witnessed Microsoft's past glory and its current "twilight of the heroes," I am no longer surprised by the collapse of its product quality in recent years. How can you expect a company that makes even a basic communication tool like Teams so bloated and subpar to nail Copilot, which demands extreme interaction design and underlying optimization? However, even I didn't anticipate that the actual reputation of Copilot among users and the market would crash to this extent.

04 DeepSeek's Fatal Blow: What Truly Deserves to be Called a Copilot?

The essence of investing is buying the team—buying the heroes who can make history. The critical issue is that the current Microsoft Office team seems no longer to be that group of people "who can get things done."

And now, DeepSeek, a "hero team" of the new century, has delivered a fatal blow to Microsoft.

From this update in their code repository, it is clear that DeepSeek is personally stepping into the ring, starting to empower OpenOffice with Agent capabilities. Given the extreme product capabilities and engineering efficiency DeepSeek has demonstrated, this is undoubtedly a public declaration of war: They are likely going to show Microsoft what level of product experience truly deserves to be called a "Copilot."

05 Conclusion: In the AI Era, No Moat is Insurmountable

As the AI era unfolds, we must re-examine the competitive barriers in the software industry.

No matter how massive traditional software is, with the exponential evolution of LLM coding capabilities and the passage of time, it is no longer an insurmountable "miracle engineering" feat. Microsoft Office's moat is truly not as unfathomable as imagined—especially when this behemoth is being maintained by a group of people with mediocre product mindsets.

The shift in market consensus is often extremely cruel and swift. When people finally realize the "Emperor's New Clothes" have been exposed, the collapse might happen very suddenly. And the singularity that triggers this industry transformation might just be today, at this very moment when DeepSeek's "True Copilot" enters the world!