Let’s be honest: That totally is a monopolistic tactic of Microsoft and regulators would do great to force this open. Force them to release a Linux Office. Force them to really make their file format transparent so that everybody can write working parsers
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I agree. They need to be either pressured or abandoned.
I feel like they would need to rewrite it completely in that case, partially because no one knows how their legacy code works and partially because it’s completely broken.
Google with it’s billions and a promise of more free data did great with how office formats work. They set some little limits of what user can do compared to MS Word so ending up with a broken table or whatever is harder, and they aslo strong-armed their way into adoption with their obvious mechanics of real-time collaboration.
I’m not sure about MS users coming to Linux, but their marketshare was already bled by Google. And if in some scenario Google releases their own internal XML format for these, I guess it’d work too.