How Proprietary Formats Became Microsoft's Main Tool for Lock-In
How proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in
I explore how Microsoft's proprietary document formats create a silent but powerful lock-in, making data inseparable from their software. Even with standardization efforts like OOXML, the complexity and undocumented features ensure that only Microsoft Office renders documents perfectly. This dependency threatens institutional memory and public sovereignty, urging a shift toward open standards like ODF to ensure true digital independence.
A document is an argument made visible. It is also, always, a set of dependencies made invisible.
- okanat
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 more features or hidden features in their formats. ALL strongly competitive software for the desktop workstations have proprietary formats: Autodesk, Altium, Adobe, Corel, Apple. All of them serialize their featureset on their own format since it is the easiest to do. FOSS won't get the marketshare pie by complaining about it.
LibreOffice has to provide feature parity before complaining here and TDF needs to find the funding source to hire the engineers to achieve that. They need to have convincing arguments and consistently delivered features. Otherwise it will not get adopted.
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. You not only get an office suite but IT Admin tooling integrates with the computers and the office suite, e-mail management, SSO and licensing management software and Cloud storage all in once.
To compete with the Microsoft (or Google Workspace) you need to be selling all of that at a very co […]
- h4kunamata
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.
- badlibrarian
I just had GPT reverse engineer, from scratch, some ancient Corel Draw documents and turn them into perfect PDFs. None of the open source libraries helped. In fact, GPT didn't make any progress until I told it to ignore them.
LibreOffice was a big part of the problem. Their import code was half-baked, and silently changing Arial to Liberation Sans wasn't particularly liberating, either.
- whateverboat
"Have become"?
Always have been. It's like people have forgotten Halloween Documents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
> In discussing ways of competing with open source, Document I suggests that one reason that open source projects had been able to enter the server market is the market's use of standardized protocols. The document then suggests that this can be stopped by "extending these protocols and developing new protocols" and "de-commoditiz[ing] protocols & applications". This policy has been internally nicknamed "embrace, extend, extinguish". Document I also suggests that open source software "is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it", and "Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence ... that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects."
- red_admiral
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.
- whatever1
An ms shop wanted to share a folder from their onedrive with me.
I could not access it until I signed up for a Microsoft account and forced to download their authenticator app.
- efitz
The 90s called. They want their article back.
- anonzzzies
This has always been the case , for most companies, but MS is very well known for it. Play along until you have enough market share and then break things in undocumented ways.