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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

#101

Post by misswaterfairy »

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.

> They are using Microsoft formats instead of the open-source one.

They will need to focus on Microsoft's formats for the foreseeable future because of the sheer amount of archaic, but still vitally important, government processes which depend on them.

Once Euro Office gains a significant foothold in those government processes, then they'll have the market power to influence. And, hopefully, force change in Microsoft's behaviour by forcing them to compete against a cheaper and just as capable open product suite.

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

#102

Post by cube00 »

inigyou wrote: post #84
frollogaston wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it. Or demand a PDF and list out the things you want to change so they can change it themselves.

> send them back an ODT

The formatting goes wonky or the macros stop working and you get the blame for doing something "weird" to the document everyone else managed to pass around just fine.

As much as you're doing the right thing by using open formats, you still end up looking like the incompetent employee. No good deed goes unpunished.

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

#104

Post by inigyou »

cube00 wrote: post #102
inigyou wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it. Or demand a PDF and list out the things you want to change so they can change it themselves.

> send them back an ODT The formatting goes wonky or the macros stop working and you get the blame for doing something "weird" to the document everyone else managed to pass around just fine. As much as you're doing the right thing by using open formats, you still end up looking like the incompetent employee. No good deed goes unpunished.

> employee

Oh well that changes things. Use whatever your boss tells you to use, they're the one paying for it.

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

#105

Post by cube00 »

inigyou wrote: post #104
cube00 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> send them back an ODT The formatting goes wonky or the macros stop working and you get the blame for doing something "weird" to the document everyone else managed to pass around just fine. As much as you're doing the right thing by using open formats, you still end up looking like the incompetent employee. No good deed goes unpunished.

> employee Oh well that changes things. Use whatever your boss tells you to use, they're the one paying for it.

> Oh well that changes things.

It's the same for any case where someone sends you something and wants it sent back with changes.

If you screw up their files it's never going to go well for you (family, friends, volunteer groups).

Nobody will ever thank you for messing up their work because it's now saved in an open format.

If they end up using a feature that triggers the format nag screen they'll likely end up saving it back into the native Microsoft format anyway.

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

#106

Post by preisschild »

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…

> Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features

Maybe, but I still disagree.

What "game-changing" features are missing from document file formats (such as word processing documents or spreadsheets)?

I'd prefer that format being an open standard with wide compatibility over those new features.

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

#107

Post by applfanboysbgon »

inigyou wrote: post #83
mangecoeur wrote: post #68

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…

> One time I tried to write Doom for a platform, from scratch. I got the 3D BSP renderer working and could move around a space with walls. I was looking for reference for how to implement the rest of the game and didn't find it. I didn't realize you're supposed to port Doom to a platform by starting from the original Doom code and not by writing it from scratch, because the only detailed enough reference is the code itself.

This is the greatest misunderstanding of a programmer's job I've ever seen (by someone who apparently programs). Of course you don't write a game from scratch every time you port it to a new platform. You aren't even really supposed to be "referencing" the game code. The game code is built on a series of abstractions over the hardware. You swap in a set of abstractions for different hardware. If the game is properly encapsulated, you may not even need to touch what would be considered the "game" code rather than the engine code, or only minimally to update API boundaries.

eg.

Layer 0: Hardware

Layer 1: OS

Layer 2: DirectX

Layer 3: Engine code, has functions like Draw3D(params) which call DirectX functions

Layer 4: Game code, which calls Draw3D(params)

If you swap in OpenGL for DirectX, you simply change engine code so that Draw3D calls OpenGL instead of DirectX as appropriate, and the game code is still just happily plopping along with the exact same Draw3D calls ignorant of whether those are being served with DirectX or OpenGL. This applies all the same even if Layer 2 is a software renderer, as Doom's was. Ditto for OS layers or anything else.

If you want to reverse engineer it from scratch for learning, have at it, but why in God's name would you think that's what porting entails? And even after you understand porting is not about writing from scratch, you should understand that this has no relevance to your overall point. I'd also note that it is possible to reverse engineer a game from scratch without ever referencing the original source code -- that's called a decompilation project, it's intensive and time-consuming work, but it can be done.

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

#108

Post by RetroTechie »

amiga386 wrote: post #71
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 lo…

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

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

#109

Post by jonathaneunice »

~~have become~~ became, 30+ years ago

The office-document format wars played out _at least_ twenty years ago.

The path dependence and "everyone uses it" (installed base) inertia of Microsoft's formats continue to benefit Microsoft (and its OOXML formats), despite ODF being more open and, in many ways, superior--not least because it's easier to implement, manipulate programmatically, and reason about.

But refighting that battle seems pointless. Users and the market have moved on, not least toward cloud-based tools; file formats no longer seem the primary barrier to competition.

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

#110

Post by pessimizer »

inigyou wrote: post #84
frollogaston wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it. Or demand a PDF and list out the things you want to change so they can change it themselves.

> You could just open it in libreoffice, make your changes and send them back an ODT, see how they like it.

We didn't, and have decided to go with someone else who costs three times as much as you do. It's a bargain after the dozen internal emails back and forth, the missed deadline, and the subsequent heated discussions with you that your ODT caused. We know they aren't as good as you are.

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