How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
blog.documentfoundation.org
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
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Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#2An ms shop wanted to share a folder from their onedrive with me.
I could not access it until I signed up for a Microsoft account and forced to download their authenticator app.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#3I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make any progress until I told it to ignore them.
LibreOffice was a big part of the problem. Their import code was half-baked, and silently changing Arial to Liberation Sans wasn't particularly liberating, either.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#4Embrace, extend, destroy. This has always been MS. They basically haven't changed since 1990.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#5This has always been the case , for most companies, but MS is very well known for it. Play along until you have enough market share and then break things in undocumented ways.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#6Embrace, extend, destroy. This has always been MS. They basically haven't changed since 1990.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. EEE.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#7An ms shop wanted to share a folder from their onedrive with me. I could not access it until I signed up for a Microsoft account and forced to download their authenticator app.
Well, at least you got to access it.
We use OneDrive at work, so I have all the right apps and accounts and whatnots. When I wanted to download a folder with a lot of files in it, it would regularly crap out.
There's no way to download the files as files unless you do it one by one. If you select multiple files, it produces a zip, which sometimes fails to transfer properly.
The Windows app is somewhat better, in that at least you can move the files as files. But even so, it's unreliable. The tray icon says everything is synced, but in the explorer some files still have the "syncing" icon. And of course, when I look on the browser, said files are missing. But there's no network activity, so it just... does nothing.
I have also not found an easy way to confirm all files are synced from the web. I haven't found an equivalent to the right-click -> properties to get the number of files and the actual size. So if you have a structure with several folders, you're SoL.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#8This is one of the things the community is pissed with https://github.com/euro-office
They are using Microsoft formats instead of the open-source one.
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#9An ms shop wanted to share a folder from their onedrive with me. I could not access it until I signed up for a Microsoft account and forced to download their authenticator app.
I mean, I'm not going to defend Onedrive (aside form saying it "mostly works just like the rest") but how is it the app or the vendors fault that someone send you a link that required an account to access? There is an "anonymous access through this link" sharing option that does work as advertised.
This works the same for Google drive and most of the other services. The problem is that most users don't understand that the link they create still has access controls attached (that they can change).
Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
#10The 90s called. They want their article back.