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Re: Suitable-to-task Debian spreadsheet software



On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 11:55:57AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

[...]

> I did see a blog post somewhere recently from someone griping about how
> unnecessarily dense, complex, and impenetrable the Microsoft Office
> document formats are, to such an extent that it makes implementing
> support for them difficult verging on impossible [...]

OOXML's spec is roughly 6000 pages compared to roughly 900 for LibreOffice's
ODF [1]. The reference also describes how the ISO approval process was
highly controversial.

> suggestion that Microsoft chose that development path on purpose,
> specifically in order to make it harder for anyone else to interoperate
> properly with those formats.

This is called "decommoditizing protocols" [2] and is a well-known
practice Microsoft is very adept at.

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
[2] https://levien.com/free/decommoditizing.html
-- 
tomas

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