Microsoft corruption [LWN.net]

Microsoft corruption

Posted May 7, 2025 3:50 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Microsoft corruption by Cyberax
Parent article: Celebrating 20 Years of the OASIS Open Document Format

In a way it's a kind of success, ODF is fine but the threat of it forced MS to commit to a stable documented open file format for their products, which is widely supported today by many open source and proprietary software without the kind of heartache that might otherwise have been in the cards if Office files were proprietary, DRMd and required royalty payments to read, with integration software being broadly illegal. Not only would Google Docs not have much of a foothold, but O365 probably wouldn't exist as a webapp if the files were still tied to the internal implementation details of the desktop suite.

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Microsoft corruption

Posted May 7, 2025 4:09 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yep, it was definitely the best outcome. ODF initially was not great (and honestly, still isn't) but its shortcomings were partially addressed later. And OOXML supplanted the awful OLE-based DOC/XLS/... formats. It's as if competition between a small number of standards is good!

Although after implementing the only open-source KMIP client, I really wish somebody would nuke OASIS from the orbit, just to be sure they don't make any new standards.

Microsoft corruption

Posted May 12, 2025 17:43 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> In a way it's a kind of success, ODF is fine but the threat of it forced MS to commit to a stable documented open file format for their products

Surprisingly enough no, it wasn't threat of ODF, but more of their own issues related to the fact that MS Office is not a product made for individuals, these days.

They needed some buzzword-compliance and thus switched to XML, sure, but format was more-or-less stabilized since MS Office 97.

"This horrible experience was perfectly normal for state-of-the-art software. I kid you not."

Posted May 12, 2025 20:58 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Except it wasn't normal. Sinofsky was talking about Office 95/97. The WordPerfect format, at least, was "frozen" with 5.0 - maybe 1990? They only changed the format with 6.0 because it needed compatibility with Office 95/97.

How many other products only changed their file formats because "MS Compatibility" forced it on them?

Cheers,
Wol

"This horrible experience was perfectly normal for state-of-the-art software. I kid you not."

Posted May 12, 2025 21:09 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Except it wasn't normal.

It certainly wasn't. Before enterprise embraced Office almost every version got its own format.

Office 95 was an exception that became the norm: it kept format compatible with Office 4.x to ensure success of Windows 95 – and sales people liked the idea of unchanging format of Office 95 so much that they caused a riot when Office 97 changed format, like was normal at the time.

Office 97 have changed format, but 2000 and 2003 haven't changed it. And if you would look for any product you'll see that Office 97/2000/2003 is listed as one format already.

> How many other products only changed their file formats because "MS Compatibility" forced it on them?

Who cares? The fact is: MS Office froze it's format not because of ODF silly games, but because their new, enterprise, customers wanted frozen format. That happened 10 years before ODF and OOXML saga.

And OOXML had zero input from anyone else, it was pure marketing, plain and simple XML is hot and we need XML format, let's create one.

That (Microsoft creates new office as “a standard de facto”, the rest of the world follows approach) wasn't any different from what happened before or after…