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

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 competitive price. Otherwise all private companies and many government departments will continue to choose Microsoft. If a change is wanted in the government, governments need to start investing Microsoft levels of money in hiring engineers.

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

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.

In the end Word & co are nothing else like fancy browsers rendering the file's contents.

As we all know from the early days of the Interwebz, each engine renders it differently...

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."

I could not access it until I signed up for a Microsoft account and forced to download their authenticator app.

We use Microsoft at work because we would either use Microsoft or Google for email. The email service is critical to the choice. We can’t run our own reliably and other vendors just don’t interoperate the same way.

Microsoft Office simply isn’t that expensive and it’s very easy to hire people who know how to use it and are comfortable with it. We don’t usually libre office because it’s really not practical to spend hours retraining expensive knowledge workers. Payroll is over half of our budget and our largest single expense. Software is cheap and isn’t even close.

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.

Given my experience building this, I think the idea of "a truly independent document":

> one that displays identically on any system, in any country, for any user, regardless of the software used

Will be very difficult to achieve in practice.

Building software is an expression of opinions. And one of the main drivers of building an app is to innovate or improve the user experience vs. what exists today. These things combine to result in new features, and new features breaks the open standard.

If I wanted to build a new Excel, I might want to add something to spreadsheets which a basic open source reader cannot, or even Excel itself, might not be able to handle.

With SmallDocs, I built on the standard rendering of markdown, but then added a bunch of properties which traditional markdown renders would ignore.

For example, styles front matter:

  ---
  styles:
    fontFamily: Lora
    baseFontSize: 17
    h1: { fontSize: 2.3, fontWeight: 700 }
    p: { lineHeight: 1.9, marginBottom: 1.2 }
    ...
  ---

And slide blocks like:

  ~~~slide
  grid 100 56.25 bg=#0b1220
  r 6 9 82 4 text=caption color=#fbbf24 align=left | LAUNCH   REVIEW  -  Q2 2026
  r 6 18 84 16 text=title color=#f8fafc align=left | Atlas 2.0 shipped to every customer
  r 6 37 78 6 text=subtitle color=#94a3b8 align=left | What changed, what it cost, and what we learned
  l 6 47 24 47 stroke=#fbbf24 strokeWidth=0.2
  ~~~

All this means SmallDocs markdown files only render correctly through our rendering engine - but this enables me to add something new to an existing document format.

[1] https://smalldocs.com; https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

Cloud/browser based office tools were already a thing decade ago. Do we have an open format except .md ? Sadly no.

Afterall, format is just a way to serialize features.

What this means for the users is that their interests are overpowered by the interests of the organization supplying them with the software. An organization can be more easily bribed both "legally" by offering a (temporary) discount and straight-up illegally by paying the procurement officer. Microsoft is known to do both. This is not a battle one can win on technological merit alone, unfortunately...

It’s possible to create read-only viewers for Word, Excel & PowerPoint files that are more-or-less pixel accurate on 99% of files, so long as the user has the correct fonts installed (or, in the case of the PowerPoint, they come embedded).