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How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

blog.documentfoundation.org

41–50 of 130 posts

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#41
post #27
post #17

FWIW, LLMs make this 95% less of a problem. It’s possible to create read-only viewers for Word, Excel & PowerPoint files that are more-or-less pixel accurate on 99% of files, so long as the user has the correct fonts installed (or, in the case of the PowerPoint, they come embedded).

There's plenty of viewers, I think even MS used to offer free MS Office readers. We need interoperability between MSOffice and everything else. But were stuck with MSOffice because even the so called open format is not well documented. MS Office is the last roadblock for Linux desktop. It's literally the last thing holding back many users from moving to anything else.

> MS Office is the last roadblock for Linux desktop. It's literally the last thing holding back many users from moving to anything else.

I think the last one has DRM shenanigans specifically to prevent it to run on Wine? Not sure of the legality of that regarding antitrust legislations but it seems that's what they've done.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#42
I think TDF tries to push a wrong narrative here for their lack of engineering and funding.

Competitive products like Google Docs, WPS or Euro Office solve proprietary file format problem very nicely. Microsoft themselves had to solve that exact problem for Lotus 1-2-3.

Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features and you cannot blame your competitor to have more features or hidden features in their formats. ALL strongly competitive software for the desktop workstations have proprietary formats: Autodesk, Altium, Adobe, Corel, Apple. All of them serialize their featureset on their own format since it is the easiest to do. FOSS won't get the marketshare pie by complaining about it.

LibreOffice has to provide feature parity before complaining here and TDF needs to find the funding source to hire the engineers to achieve that. They need to have convincing arguments and consistently delivered features. Otherwise it will not get adopted.

Microsoft hasn't actually selling their product on the premise of proprietary file format support. They sell it with the promise of total platform integration for every single software an office needs. You not only get an office suite but IT Admin tooling integrates with the computers and the office suite, e-mail management, SSO and licensing management software and Cloud storage all in once.

To compete with the Microsoft (or Google Workspace) you need to be selling all of that at a very competitive price. Otherwise all private companies and many government departments will continue to choose Microsoft. If a change is wanted in the government, governments need to start investing Microsoft levels of money in hiring engineers.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#43

An 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.

Was your account banned the next day for "suspicious activity"? That's the full Microsoft experience.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strategy is over 20 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

Arguably not, if they're still doing eee... Even vscode is just a shell again with most noteable extensions /language servers being proprietary again

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#45
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That strategy is over 20 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

Are they? They extended DNS, LDAP and Kerberos to make Active Directory so that now every Microsoft-locked corporation is stuck using Microsoft as their internal DNS. They do the various things they do to get everyone stuck using their email instead of any other standard IMAP/SMTP/webmail provider. Azure is "somehow" one of the three major cloud providers.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#46
post #13

I think people should get over with "file formats" Cloud/browser based office tools were already a thing decade ago. Do we have an open format except .md ? Sadly no. Afterall, format is just a way to serialize features.

Ummm... OpenDocument, which is an ISO standard? https://www.oasis-open.org/tc-opendocument/

Standard doesn't mean good. Win32 is a better API than POSIX. MSOffice used to work much better than LibreOffice. Linux is better than UNIX.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#47
post #39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of viewers, I think even MS used to offer free MS Office readers. We need interoperability between MSOffice and everything else. But were stuck with MSOffice because even the so called open format is not well documented. MS Office is the last roadblock for Linux desktop. It's literally the last thing holding back many users from moving to anything else.

So many things holding the Linux desktop back. No support from OEM vendors to sell pre-installed devices on consumer stores, even if they do support it, it is a custom OEM distro, because differentiation, like on the netbooks, Android, or drivers tied to a specific Ubuntu release, with shovelware. Games, no studio cares about Linux native games, thus Proton. Game studios keep happily using Windows, Visual Studio, up…

And what have you done to fix this? In open source, nobody is coming to save you. You are open source.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959090

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#48
post #47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many things holding the Linux desktop back. No support from OEM vendors to sell pre-installed devices on consumer stores, even if they do support it, it is a custom OEM distro, because differentiation, like on the netbooks, Android, or drivers tied to a specific Ubuntu release, with shovelware. Games, no studio cares about Linux native games, thus Proton. Game studios keep happily using Windows, Visual Studio, up…

And what have you done to fix this? In open source, nobody is coming to save you. You are open source. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48959090

Well, though luck if you think that will save Linux Desktop.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#49
post #44
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

Arguably not, if they're still doing eee... Even vscode is just a shell again with most noteable extensions /language servers being proprietary again

FAANG still wins out.

Re: How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in

#50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In regards to FOSS, Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and co, are much better at it than Microsoft has been.

Are they? They extended DNS, LDAP and Kerberos to make Active Directory so that now every Microsoft-locked corporation is stuck using Microsoft as their internal DNS. They do the various things they do to get everyone stuck using their email instead of any other standard IMAP/SMTP/webmail provider. Azure is "somehow" one of the three major cloud providers.

Yes, given how many FOSS projects change their licenses thanks to FAANG leeching, and walled garden platforms built on FOSS software.
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