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

blog.documentfoundation.org

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

#71

Post by amiga386 »

okanat wrote: post #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 m…

Not so much TDF as Italo Vignoli

I noticed this HN comment from four months ago and boy does it have his number:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630474

> I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. [...] Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are [...] This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. [...]

And now I look at who authored this article. "2026-07-17 Italo Vignoli"

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

#74

Post by inigyou »

rleigh wrote: post #67
inigyou wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been developing open source software since the late '90s. I was a Debian developer for nearly 15 years. I stopped actively participating in this stuff about 10 years ago. I'm involved in a few libraries and that's it. The "Linux" ecosystem is utter chaos, and there are too many developers who are their own worst enemies. There's too much churn, and too little strategic thought. Compatibility is king. Microsoft k…

You can fix it by making a Linux ecosystem that isn't chaos.

I'm pretty sure Apple proved that compatibility isn't the end-all-be-all of customer satisfaction. It was useful to Microsoft at a certain point in time. But what people actually care about is getting their stuff to work right now, not being stuck in the past. We now tend to run old software in VMs or just old hardware rather than trying to make it work on the latest OS version. VMs weren't yet very popular or developed at the time Microsoft had a singular focus on compatibility.

In fact, Microsoft wasn't even trying to keep customer systems working. Microsoft was trying to sell unnecessary upgrades to those customer systems, which will only be bought if they make the systems better. The customer was perfectly fine with not upgrading their software and letting the system continue to run as-is. The software industry doesn't really work like that any more - platforms are free and non-free software comes with a subscription - there's not as much pressure to sell unnecessary system upgrades. Also you can just make the system upgrade itself over the internet and tell the customer to cope and seethe.

Do people still try to run Word 97 or do they just buy Google Docs?

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

#76

Post by CMay »

h4kunamata wrote: post #8

This 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.

PDF, ODT, ODS, ODP and TXT are all fully open formats, listed right on the page.

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

#77

Post by frollogaston »

okanat wrote: post #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 m…

"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."

Idk, the entire reason I've ever used Office was because someone gave me files I'm afraid to screw up.

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

#78

Post by KronisLV »

h4kunamata wrote: post #8

This 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.

> Euro-Office liberates the ONLYOFFICE code base

Oh that and the following paragraphs are salty, after all of the mess of Euro-Office violating their copyright (OO's arguments about which may or may not hold up in court).

Personally, I'll probably just stick with LibreOffice until things calm down a bit.

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

#80

Post by daft_pink »

I feel they are pushing their own narrative without really having any evidence.

We use Microsoft at work because we would either use Microsoft or Google for email. The email service is critical to the choice. We can’t run our own reliably and other vendors just don’t interoperate the same way.

Microsoft Office simply isn’t that expensive and it’s very easy to hire people who know how to use it and are comfortable with it. We don’t usually libre office because it’s really not practical to spend hours retraining expensive knowledge workers. Payroll is over half of our budget and our largest single expense. Software is cheap and isn’t even close.

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