I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life.
Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.
MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.
The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.
Its been Microsoft's strategy since its formation to make a lot of proprietary technology when it moves into any space and do so in a way that locks customers in such that if and when it is no longer the top product the customers can't easily leave. They do this in every single product and market they operate in. Where they can't ultimately win they buy their competitor and integrate the product then slowly kill it.
coliveira · 4m ago
It is important to remind people of this, because they imagine that MS is integrating open source projects like git, linux, and others for the goodness of their heart. It's well know that this is just step 1 of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Next step (underway) is to add many features that will work only under the MS ecosystem and finally declare those original tools as legacy that should not be allowed in corporations.
BizarroLand · 41m ago
Gates never even made DOS. He bought it from someone else and rebranded it. He's been a con man since day 1.
psunavy03 · 25m ago
. . . being a savvy businessman is a con man? There's loads to criticize about MS in the 80s and 90s, but buying DOS fair and square and then building an ecosystem around it was just a good business move. The stuff they got sued and almost broken up over is the sketchy part.
edm0nd · 37m ago
Still the only big tech CEO who can jump over a chair tho
ASalazarMX · 16m ago
New business idea: selling small luxury chairs to big tech CEOs. Subscription service, if they don't pay a million per month, they lose their license to jump over their chair.
loloquwowndueo · 33m ago
But I bet he can’t throw them the way monkey boy Ballmer did.
pseudosavant · 25m ago
How did this make the HN homepage? There isn't even any news here. It is an argument about ~20-year-old XML file formats, at a time when file formats couldn't matter less?
On top of that, Office supports OpenDocument formats, just like LibreOffice supports Office formats.
Also, IME the Office XML file format is far better supported by third parties - countless apps read/write them. I have multiple apps installed that can read/write an Office file, but MS Office is the only app on my machine that opens OpenDocument.
OnionBlender · 1h ago
Why does the title say "slams" but neither the headline or URL contain "slams"? I think anything that says slams is not worth reading.
Ukv · 1h ago
Saving 4 characters (over "calls out") to fit within the HN submission title length limit, I'd assume.
extrememacaroni · 1h ago
I don't think microsoft could feel a slam from anyone tbh, much less libreoffice.
jollyllama · 51m ago
Headlinese
Pooge · 42m ago
I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users?
Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for.
And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.
n8cpdx · 39m ago
If you have such little regard for formatting that markdown suffices, you also don’t care about the difficult edge cases of docx.
carlosjobim · 32m ago
WordPad, Notepad, or TextEdit is already included on the computer and perfectly fine for most writing and printed communication.
firesteelrain · 46m ago
It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc
It’s an entire ecosystem
Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished
There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either
Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult
Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb
SoftTalker · 7m ago
> I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool.
I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else.
I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.
jasonjayr · 30m ago
At one point LibreOffice + MS Office were pretty much on par with each other.
But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment.
It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience.
If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?
firesteelrain · 27m ago
Google tried to get kids hooked in school and it’s decent. But when you want to do serious work, you need to use Microsoft products. Google’s product is like a toy
trelane · 15m ago
Most serious users can use things other than Microsoft just fine. The problem is file compatibility. Unfortunately, network effects are very much a thing. Plus most users just don't realize they don't actually have to keep shovelling money at Microsoft.
freeopinion · 21m ago
I have met very few non-techies that could tell the difference between Word and Wordpad or use them any differently.
Most people below the age of 30 can switch between Google Docs or Word without blinking. They don't use more than a few of the features of either.
This "big hill" you mention is a fantasy.
trelane · 17m ago
You're right for home users. In businesses, the hill is also that some users are power users that have locked themselves in, in slightly different ways between the different power users. Also the company has also locked itself in by drinking deeply from the Microsoft well (e.g. AD and sharepoint and Windows etc) and marketing away will cost them a lot of time and effort, and therefore money.
trelane · 34m ago
If LibreOffice were smart, they'd introduce free licensing for schools and universities, so the students could learn it and then ask for it when they get to jobs later on.
Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.
Hasn't this always been an argument against it? I remember hearing the same arguments when we tried to get the EU to ditch OpenXML over a decade ago al least.
I didn’t realise we’d entered a time machine to 2007. I’ve worked extensively with OOXML and yes, the documentation is cryptic and often absent, but Microsoft will help you out if you contact them on their forums. I see Libre Office devs there all the time!
But the complexity is not some kind of conspiracy - it’s inherent - it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features. Many features are implemented in backwards compatible way on top of the old version of similar features and then the whole thing has been back ported from a bunch of C structure to XML which has the most woeful and underpowered schema language imaginable.
troupo · 1m ago
> it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features.
IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.
So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.
WillAdams · 56m ago
I'd really like to see an office suite which uses .md and .csv where possible.
Mostly I use LyX and pyspread which are close/open enough.
eviks · 29m ago
These are too primitive for an office suite
cahaya · 40m ago
I can confirm. When trying convert simple Word sentences and tables to e.g. Markdown/HTML from a Word XML you need a PhD in XML edge cases and nested garbage.
paulbjensen · 14m ago
I wonder if this tool by MSFT is able to handle that:
I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.
I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).
eviks · 26m ago
Meanwhile, has a better modern featureful extensible rich text format been invented?
I mean… sure? When I saw this headline I was imagining that Microsoft added a brand-new ultracomplicated format. But no, the article is solely about OOXML. Why is the blog post re-litigating a fight that LibreOffice already fought almost 20 years ago?
AtNightWeCode · 32m ago
It is a plague across the whole industry. The format in this case is highly influenced by how one corp designed their own products. Multiple document formats have this problem. But you can also find the exact same thing in PCI DSS and other standards. Like, one corp designed a tool to scan for a certain flaw and suddenly it is mandatory. Just ridiculous.
zerr · 1h ago
Isn't it the same for PDF format spec?
cogman10 · 1h ago
The PDF spec is well designed to be both very expandable and easily readable.
It's absolutely horrible to try and edit.
That's because the structure of a PDF is essentially a bunch of media "streams". It's very easy to say "render a jpeg at this location on the page" but that's about it. It doesn't store, for example, the fact that you might need to wrap words around a page. Instead, it's "Here's a box with text in it".
The only thing that really could make PDF rendering hard is adobe put a whole bunch of garbage into the spec. For example, the full spec had the ability to run javascript and flash at one point (not sure if it does anymore).
mook · 41m ago
JavaScript must still be there, because I think that's how form validation works? Don't recall Flash ever being there though.
atakan_gurkan · 1h ago
No. There are hundreds of programs that easily read and create PDFs. OTOH, reading .docx is a pain. Far be it from me to defend Adobe, but PDF is nothing like MS Office formats.
jahewson · 55m ago
Ooh that’s not fair. Many PDFs don’t conform to the spec and how Acrobat processes them is completely undocumented.
izacus · 50m ago
No, that spec is outright nice if you consider the PCs it was made for.
gigel82 · 1h ago
I doubt this one is explicit "locking in", as much as it's reflecting the increasing internal complexity and lack of focus on product quality. I'd be willing to bet the internal teams dread working with the overly complex structures too.
delusional · 46m ago
At this point I doubt Microsoft could even execute on a "lock in" strategy anymore.
kazinator · 2h ago
Microsoft doesn't lock in people.
People lock in people.
majorchord · 2h ago
You might not be wrong, but yelling at people for accepting conveniences that most don't even understand or care about, seems a bit pointless to me. Why even stop at document formats? Why not outrage over their choice of Windows itself?
What good do you think this does? I'm genuinely curious.
tracker1 · 1h ago
Well, according to StatsCounter, Linux now accounts for 5% of desktop users. :-)
ChromeOS another 2.7% and macOS around 24%.
edit: If I were to guess, Valve/Steam is solely responsible for at least 1 of those 5%.
kazinator · 1h ago
> Why not outrage over their choice of Windows itself?
Because it doesn't necessarily affect anyone. Using Windows ipso facto doesn't mean you will send someone a file they can't read without a Microsoft program.
I have two Windows machines in my home; they have LibreOffice on them, as well as Firefox.
Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.
MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.
The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.
[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal
On top of that, Office supports OpenDocument formats, just like LibreOffice supports Office formats.
Also, IME the Office XML file format is far better supported by third parties - countless apps read/write them. I have multiple apps installed that can read/write an Office file, but MS Office is the only app on my machine that opens OpenDocument.
Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for.
And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.
It’s an entire ecosystem
Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished
There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either
Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult
Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb
I use word processors so rarely that every time it's like learning a new tool. Whether it's Word, Google Doc, LibreOffice, or anything else.
I will say that Google Docs and Word both feel a bit more "polished" than LibreOffice which still feels very distinctly like a 1990's era desktop program. I guess because it is.
But MS has built this giant moat of integrated proprietary services around these systems that make it difficult to switch away once you are sucked into the environment.
It takes a pretty sizable expense to switch to anything else, while satisfying all of a companies different workflows for various roles and levels of experience.
If not MS Office + it's M365 Eco system, what then? Google Workspace? That's kinda the same problem in a different color?
Most people below the age of 30 can switch between Google Docs or Word without blinking. They don't use more than a few of the features of either.
This "big hill" you mention is a fantasy.
Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.
[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
But the complexity is not some kind of conspiracy - it’s inherent - it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features. Many features are implemented in backwards compatible way on top of the old version of similar features and then the whole thing has been back ported from a bunch of C structure to XML which has the most woeful and underpowered schema language imaginable.
IIRC one of the many unfortunate decisions made by MS with OOXML (whether intentionally, or not, or both) is to codify a lot of display and formatting quirks directly in the schema with very little explanation or docs. Instead of making it s different namespace or layer.
So, to implement OOXML, you also needed to reverse engineer, say, behavior of Word97 etc.
Mostly I use LyX and pyspread which are close/open enough.
https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.
I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).
I mean… sure? When I saw this headline I was imagining that Microsoft added a brand-new ultracomplicated format. But no, the article is solely about OOXML. Why is the blog post re-litigating a fight that LibreOffice already fought almost 20 years ago?
It's absolutely horrible to try and edit.
That's because the structure of a PDF is essentially a bunch of media "streams". It's very easy to say "render a jpeg at this location on the page" but that's about it. It doesn't store, for example, the fact that you might need to wrap words around a page. Instead, it's "Here's a box with text in it".
The only thing that really could make PDF rendering hard is adobe put a whole bunch of garbage into the spec. For example, the full spec had the ability to run javascript and flash at one point (not sure if it does anymore).
People lock in people.
What good do you think this does? I'm genuinely curious.
ChromeOS another 2.7% and macOS around 24%.
edit: If I were to guess, Valve/Steam is solely responsible for at least 1 of those 5%.
Because it doesn't necessarily affect anyone. Using Windows ipso facto doesn't mean you will send someone a file they can't read without a Microsoft program.
I have two Windows machines in my home; they have LibreOffice on them, as well as Firefox.