MS Office file formats

Posted Dec 1, 2004 22:34 UTC (Wed) by danielthaler (guest, #24764)
In reply to: What is a software invention? by XERC
Parent article: Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

It certainly would do a big bang.

I disagree. While they are horribly complex MS Office file formats are fairly well understood; for older Versions there is actually documentation from MS (on wotsit.org).
OpenOffice does a good job of displaying such files; the reason it isn't perfect is that OO simply can't use all the information in other formats.
So that probably isn't the reason people continue to use MS Office