this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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So don't work in Word docs. It's not a proper standard anyway.
It's an industry standard.
Go see what lawyers use. Until fairly recently Word Perfect was still a thing for them (well, about 10 years ago anyway).
You don't get to choose the formats other people use, or what you'll have to deal with.
Your attitude is the stereotypical never-had-to-face-reality mindset.
It's a monoply, not a standard. It's not a standard as no one else can properly implement it. There are undocumented binary parts that were meant to be transitory to get through ISO. Which was just one of many dirty MS tricks to get it through ISO. The reference implementation is closed.
I don't expect normal people to understand formats. I expect law makers to.
The UK government got this right : https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-principles/open-standards-principles
The EU have clobbered MS before over this kind of nonsense and should again. And Google and Apple and others.
Competition needs to be possible. We need to avoid today being tomorrow's digital darkage.
Nice pedantry, you're good at purposefully ignoring the forest for the trees.
Industry standard, as in what pretty much everyone uses - you know, a colloquial term, but you knew that and chose to ignore it to get on some high horse.
So you don't get a choice about being incompatible.
I didn't say I liked it, just it is what it is. Let me see you deploy 10,000 laptops/desktops in an enterprise without office, and find out how much that costs you in lost productivity. Or how many things you simply can't do, at all. Like using OneNote, with the server infrastructure for syncing between people with domain level user administration. Nothing, and I mean nothing at all in Linux/OSS world comes anywhere close to the capabilities of ON.
And Excel, again, people have decades of experience and pre-built docs/templates that have little chance of perfectly importing into any other systems.
Similarly, find me a CAD program competitive with Auto desk or Catia that runs on Linux.
Keep on screeching that people should just squander hundreds of man-years of effort to switch, that'll sure convince 'em. People have more important things to do with their time, like the work in front of them.
It's about competition, heathy market and legacy. You can't have that with formats like OOXML. Deliberately so.
I can't find the story, but I think it was of the British library, trying to recover documents in very old Microsoft Word. They had to chain together VMs of old Windows with old Word versions to get it the documents to the modern world. Formating will have been mangled of course.
That is how it is with proprietary "standards". It's like ensuring today is a digital darkage.