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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

#91

I'm sure this is a serious problem, but I'm not sure it's the main problem. The other one, that might be an even bigger problem is the way Microsoft sells its products. While, technically, most of the stuff they sell appears as B2C products, they are sold as B2B, and increasingly more so since the emphasis shifted towards the Web versions. What this means for the users is that their interests are overpowered by the i…

The second part is alarming, but offering a temporary discount is a routine and standard pricing strategy; not a 'bribe'.

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

#92
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice. Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of d…

They are a lock-in tool but they are also completely natural and available to everyone. Have you ever written any software that saves files? Is its file format proprietary? Some are more complicated than others, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. At best you wrote some Markdown explaining it broadly (and some of your code has drifted so that is incorrect now), at worst maybe yo…

> There are still differences between PDFs in different viewers

Most obvious when viewing PDFs in Adobe Reader versus in Chrome's built-in viewer. The former has subpixel anti-aliasing. The latter doesn't.

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

#93
Microsoft managed to build office online, which saves to DOCX etc. - the online version may have reduced functionality, but you can edit the same document with the full office at work and the browser version at home and it won't mess things up. So building a new office on top of the MS formats seems possible. You could probably even use AI for the things the other (open/libre/...)Office developers can't or don't want to do.

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

#94

Microsoft managed to build office online, which saves to DOCX etc. - the online version may have reduced functionality, but you can edit the same document with the full office at work and the browser version at home and it won't mess things up. So building a new office on top of the MS formats seems possible. You could probably even use AI for the things the other (open/libre/...)Office developers can't or don't want…

Ghidra-MCP is allegedly really good for reverse engineering. Haven't tried it myself.

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

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice. Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of d…

They are a lock-in tool but they are also completely natural and available to everyone. Have you ever written any software that saves files? Is its file format proprietary? Some are more complicated than others, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. At best you wrote some Markdown explaining it broadly (and some of your code has drifted so that is incorrect now), at worst maybe yo…

I have written software that saves files and saves to standard geopackage formats.

Microsoft is known to have a lot of inconsistencies between its spec and reality. One important part of adoption open standards formats is that when you have real interoperability and competition between consumers of the format, the spec needs to actually work. HTML and the welcome demise of Internet Explorer specific markup through real competition in the browser space is a case in point

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

#96
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice. Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of d…

They are a lock-in tool but they are also completely natural and available to everyone. Have you ever written any software that saves files? Is its file format proprietary? Some are more complicated than others, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. At best you wrote some Markdown explaining it broadly (and some of your code has drifted so that is incorrect now), at worst maybe yo…

> I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard.

What matters to me, if I'm communicating with my government (or vice-versa), is that they only use recognised standards.

I will need a web browser, email client, document editor... but not a specific web browser, email client, document editor.

This takes effort from governments, because the vendors of all the products they consume want to try and leverage their government connection to get lock-in and thus make their products mandatory for everyone in the country.

For example, even if government developers only use Chrome browser and neglect to test on Safari, you can end up with millions of Safari or iPhone users unable to perform legally essential tasks, and have no workaround. The same is true for using proprietary office document formats, and that includes Adobe when there's a difference between PDF-as-specified versus PDF-as-implemented-in-Adobe's-proprietary-software.

The importance of standards is that they tell every vendor exactly how to conform and not-conform to the standard. Hence the standard itself has to be made be robust. Hence why a standards committee has to own it, not a proprietary vendor. If it's a proprietary format undergoing standardisation, the standardisation's job is to file off the rough edges and make it interoperable. It doesn't take some fragile code that only works in one way, and say "that's the standard". It throws out the fragile bullshit like Microsoft's broken date handling that they don't even bother to fully document in OOXML.

For comparison, a better standard and standards body (even though they have their own problems e.g. being dominated by Google) would be HTML5 and WHATWG. Everything is carefully specified so that all browser vendors can implement a standard, identically. That even includes things like word-wrapping (a small subset of document layout!), and there are test suites to catch deviations from the standard.

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

#97
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…

> macOS desktop software

Which runs on a FOSS kernel, just that it's BSD instead of Linux.

> Games, no studio cares about Linux native games

Steam deck?

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

#98
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a lock-in tool but they are also completely natural and available to everyone. Have you ever written any software that saves files? Is its file format proprietary? Some are more complicated than others, but I'd bet dollars to donuts you didn't make your format an ISO standard. At best you wrote some Markdown explaining it broadly (and some of your code has drifted so that is incorrect now), at worst maybe yo…

I have written software that saves files and saves to standard geopackage formats. Microsoft is known to have a lot of inconsistencies between its spec and reality. One important part of adoption open standards formats is that when you have real interoperability and competition between consumers of the format, the spec needs to actually work. HTML and the welcome demise of Internet Explorer specific markup through re…

We can see from Fediverse that the spec still isn't really good enough. You have to code against Mastodon's code and Akkoma's code and GoToSocial's code. If you code against the ActivityPub/ActivityStreams spec, it won't actually work in the real world.

Same with most protocols. HTTP is followed closely enough, but forget about even strictly spec-compliant SMTP. Protocol specs are more like statements of intent.

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

#99
post #67
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…

I mean that's a feature of running your community as a bazaar.

The one thing Linus himself sensibly enforces though is kernel backwards compatibility - "we do not break userspace".

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

#100
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…

> macOS desktop software Which runs on a FOSS kernel, just that it's BSD instead of Linux. > Games, no studio cares about Linux native games Steam deck?

> Which runs on a FOSS kernel, just that it's BSD instead of Linux.

That was long time ago, good luck trying to make your own distro out of Darwin.

> Steam deck?

Runs Windows games developed on Windows, with Visual Studio, using DirectX, via Proton.

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