Yes, libreoffice doesn’t really work for live collaboration. But office online is a good solution for that collaboration (…) Therefore, the author’s conclusion (you need windows to collaborate on word docs) is still wrong.
The author isn’t wrong neither he’s right as the actual answer is: it depends. We don’t even have to go as far as “live collaboration” if you’ve to do serious work in MS Office apps just emailing a document to a co-worker that uses LibreOffice can end up badly. LibreOffice works, yes, until you find your custom TOC broken, macros not working, embedded content from other documents not there… images scattered around or even paragraphs ending on a different page just because the MS version of some font is slightly different from what comes with LibreOffice but different enough to totally trash your document. Even Office online has issues with some of the things I described, let alone LibreOffice and this is precisely why people in big companies buy MS Office.
Let me show you even on a very simple document I just made how wrong you are. I created the following document in MS Word and then proceeded to open it in LibreOffice just look at the comments:
So… LibreOffice can’t even ensure that the most basic formatting and features are displayed and saved properly. So much for “it works fine”.
I personally also believe that WYSIWYG editors are highly overrated: markdown is significantly better for note-taking and similar small documents, and reports would often be better off with LaTeX or something similar.
Let me guess you’re someone who works in IT and never had a typical “office job” that includes spending 90% of your time writing reports and pushing spreadsheets around. This is why you don’t get it, you’re not the typical user of MS Office and you don’t share the same use cases the OP, the article author and myself share.