The one thing you have to give Microsoft is backwards compatibility. They make hot garbage, but God damn if you can’t run that garbage from 10 years ago.
Comment on LibreOffice is right about Microsoft, and it matters more than you think.
racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I’ve heard this comment about OpenXML (the xml format of the office documents) before, and i’m a bit on the fence about it.
It’s of course indeed ridiculously complex, but so is office. Microsoft both adds a shit ton of functionality to their documents, and keeps an impressive amount of backwards compatibility.
In the past i heard complaints about part of the OpenXML spec that also allows older binary data in there for backwards compatibility reasons, which of course means for OSS implementations that they don’t just have to implement this spec, but also the older spec that came before to be truly compatible with everything a modern office version can open.
But on the other hand, if i look at it from the side of Microsoft, they opened up their format, they’ve got a gazillion functionalities, should they remove functionality to appease the open source developers? If so which? Should they stop being backwards compatible with documents of decades ago to appease the open source developers? If so how long should they support? Are you going to tell their customers?
Office is an immense program with an immense amount of legacy features, backwards compatibility, …
It’s incredibly complex by nature. And might they have made the format more complex to dissuade competition? Could be. However, in this instance Occam’s razor pushes me more to “write a huge program over a timespan of many decades, with thousands upon thousands of programmers working on it, and you’ll indeed most likely end up with something very complex…”
madcaesar@lemmy.world 2 days ago
T156@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Although 10 years ago isn’t that long in computer terms any more. That’s basically 4th Gen Intel Core CPU territory. It’s an older computer, but still perfectly usable these days.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I haven’t done the experiment, I’m curious to know if you can take a random binary compiled for Linux 10 years ago run on the latest version of popular distros. See in which ones it runs.
T156@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Depends on it and its dependencies, probably. A lot of the core utilities are generally unchanged enough that they should still work despite being a decade old.
EnsignWashout@startrek.website 22 hours ago
Sure, but it’s not quite the compelling argument it used to be.
Today, I’m not sitting here pining for old Linux software that stopped working. And the small amount of old windows software that did finally stop working actually works now only works on Linux with Wine.
That’s another of the decision points that finally switched to fully favoring Linux, for me, in the last decade.
lengau@midwest.social 2 days ago
I would agree, except that every piece of it is significantly more complex than it needs to be. ODF is considerably simpler in part because it makes use of other pre-existing standards for things like dates and times. OOXML redefines so many of those things, and in many cases Microsoft Office’s implementation isn’t actually compatible with their own standard.
racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Do you have more concrete examples? I’m reasonably familiar with OpenXML, and seeing the date issues in microsoft systems (Excel having the same bug that considers 1900 a leap year, to stay compatible with Lotus Notes), i can imagine them redefining everything just to be in full control ^^'…
lengau@midwest.social 2 days ago
Integer storage in spreadsheets… There are a ridiculous number of ways to store any integer, and I don’t just mean because you could theoretically store
1and00000001and they’d be interpreted as the same thing.
kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.