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

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.

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…