Microsoft: Good or Evil:

Splitting off from the Calling any software developerst thread...

433N said:

I'm not sure Java is the best language to learn jobwise but I have the impression it is a bit more rigorous and powerful than python or javascript and I can't bring myself to commit to C# / .NET as they are tainted by association with Microsoft.

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Adam Williams said:

Completely understand your wariness with Microsoft. I think they've improved in the last few years, open sourcing the CLR, .NET Core, making things work cross-platform and a bunch of other tools but in the back of my mind I'll always be a bit distrustful.

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takno said:

I wouldn't just write off C#/.NET though. Microsoft aren't the evil empire they were 5 years ago either, and C# is a very capable language running on a very capable and quite open platform.

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As someone who's worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years, I really struggle to understand why people object to Microsoft. Sure, they are a very large company and I doubt any large company has a perfect record, but my experience is that they seem pretty cool at keeping their software relatively open, and on those occasions when I've interacted with MS software development teams, I've found them very keen to interact with consumers and to improve their products.

As a couple of examples:

• It's fully 14 years ago that MS started working on opening up and standardising and publishing their complete Word/Excel/Powerpoint file formats, essentially allowing anyone else to create compatible competing packages - that was long before open-sourcing stuff became 'the thing to do'.
• 15-20 years ago MS software often had a reputation for being a bit unreliable - and Windows 95 was often unstable - but a big part of the reason was the way MS tried to make sure that it was open as far as hardware was concerned: That anyone could make hardware for Windows machines - great for a free market, but also giving themselves loads of problems with hardware incompatibilities. Compare that with the way Apple have always tried to keep their operating system and hardware exclusive to themselves - resulting in Apple being able to charge - and actually charging - what often seem to be fairly extortionate prices for their machines (and their phones).
• On UI's, MS seem have always been on the forefront of seeking to improve standards. I personally recall about 10 years ago, I started playing with Safari and Apple IPlayer - and fairly quickly concluded that their usability and customizability was streets behind what Microsoft software invariably offered. (Though I don't know if things have improved since then)
• If I plug my Android phone into a Windows machine, transferring files just works - apparently because both Microsoft and Google are reasonably committed to inter-operability. On the other hand, when friends of mine try to plug iPhones into Windows machines, transferring files is an absolute nightmare - which appears to because Apple just aren't interested in working with rival operating systems.

To my mind, if any large software company is the 'bad guy' when it comes to competition and ethical behaviour, it's surely Apple, not Microsoft. And of course if you go out of the software business, you could point to many, many companies (for example, most oil companies) that are arguably massively less ethical than Microsoft (or indeed, than most software companies).

So why do so many people find Microsoft so objectionable?

Microsoft were historically terrible with their embrace-extend-extinguish philosophy. Sure as a developer in a Microsoft shop I had unfettered free access to development versions of their software at no cost other than the millions of pounds my employer handed over to them every year in licensing fees. Without that I had access to nothing.

Their entire sales strategy was based around getting their foot in the door with windows theand and then making it difficult to use non Microsoft products for anything else, a process which they had to acknowledge when it earned them a very expensive day in court.

The examples you provide of openness and interoperability are frankly bizarre. They opened up their office file formats (which were absolutely terrible) through ECMA only when governments started to mandate open file formats, and even then only as an effort to kill off the genuinely open formats that OpenOffice had already standardised through IOS. It's questionable even then whether you could use them as an open format since they were essentially just thousands of pages documenting weird historical bugs which you would have to copy, and which likely required patented processes to reproduce.

On the ability to plug your phone into a Windows computer, Windows encouraged manufacturers to build the pretty awful FAT file format into their products in order to make it a de-facto standard, and then once it was in widespread use they sued all the manufacturers for using their essential patents in implementing it, resulting in a license fee which may have added $15 to the price of all your phones. Apple simply decided they didn't need to play ball.

Initially, I think Microsoft did great things in personal computing, particularly in developing an operating system which undermined Apple's pricing. I don't really have anything against Microsoft and they produce systems which are of use to alot of people ... I just don't see where they have been going for a long time and everything seems to be sales driven. Software changes are incremental and, to be honest, very few people will use much of the 'new functionality' which gets bundled into things like Office updates ... I would probably still be happy with Word for Windows 3.1.

I bought a laptop running Windows 8.0, they encouraged me to upgrade to 8.1 which I did and then all of my I/O operations fell out. I rang Microsoft 'help' who couldn't help but offered to sell me Windows 8.0 media to re-install on my laptop. At that point, I'd had enough of their ways and I moved over to Linux which I have been happy enough with not to consider returning to Windows for a second. I use OpenOffice, various other open source apps and either Chromium or Firefox as browsers and I can't really think of what Microsoft have to offer me which is better. In addition, I don't have to continually update and/or upgrade to try to avoid the barrage of malware coming at me. Of course, needs must sometimes for work and things.

At the end of the day, I don't really have an issue with Microsoft. They have probably cornered the market in office PC's and have OS's that people are familiar with and people can become confident with ; fine. I've not had good experiences with their phones or tablets and just feel that the future won't be dominated by Microsoft to the same extent as the past. I do object to their sales and marketing practices which have often been concerned with extinguishing competition, even if that competition is a better product ; if you listened very carefully, you could hear Adam Smith turning in his grave. I also object to the way that using computers in schools has become synonymous with using Microsoft products ... but that might not be their fault.

Microsoft are realising very quickly that their market share is taking some pretty big hits and have been taking up ventures in services to offset that. Their purchase of GitHub is particularly noteworthy and could cause major problems for the open source community if they enact particularly poor policies. I do approve of the opening of .NET Core (and eventual merger of .NET Framework and Core) as a multi platform SDK - it seems to be outstripping Mono in every regard, and could spell great things for software portability.

I am a Linux power user, though I still use windows 7 for gaming. In a few years I'll likely no longer use any MS products except GitHub and what was Hotmail.

The Microsoft of twenty years ago is not the one we have today and I think many of us in the IT industry are pretty damned grateful for it. Beyond SDKs and developer strategy, their acceptance and adoption of certain aspects of Linux is thrilling to see (Windows Subsystem for Linux is especially welcome), although it could be argued that MS didn't really have a choice to go down that path...adapt or die, etc.

I also have to use Windows for limited aspects of my job but that's only ever via a Windows 10 VM. MacOS all the way for me. Now if only MS would bring a native PowerBI and Visio applications to Mac I'd be pretty damned happy..the 365 versions are pretty irksome.

I wonder if Google lived up to their (then) "don't be evil" motto in the saga of blocking the YouTube app for Windows Phone - why did they insist on conditions that they didn't apply to themselves (Android) or Apple (iOS)?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-is-google-blocking-the-new-youtube-app-for-windows-phone/

87 027 said:

I wonder if Google lived up to their (then) "don't be evil" motto in the saga of blocking the YouTube app for Windows Phone - why did they insist on conditions that they didn't apply to themselves (Android) or Apple (iOS)?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-is-google-blocking-the-new-youtube-app-for-windows-phone/

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Google are far from saints, and are arguably a lot worse now, but at the time Microsoft were battering Android with the unreasonable license fees and trying to extend their desktop dominance to Windows. The position on the YouTube app was completely fair game

I think Microsoft have a sound strategy. They've transformed themselves from a "desktop" business to a "cloud" business. This wasn't easy, they've had disasters along the way, their phones being an example, but with Azure, Office 365 and business applications such as Dynamics 365 they've got themselves in pretty good shape

takno said:

The examples you provide of openness and interoperability are frankly bizarre. They opened up their office file formats (which were absolutely terrible) through ECMA only when governments started to mandate open file formats,

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How did Governments mandate open-ness? Was MS somehow forced to open up the Word/Excel/Powerpoint with an ECMA standard? That seems unlikely to me since other products - such as Access and Outlook remained proprietary, with access to the date in the files only available through APIs.

takno said:

and even then only as an effort to kill off the genuinely open formats that OpenOffice had already standardised through IOS. It's questionable even then whether you could use them as an open format since they were essentially just thousands of pages documenting weird historical bugs which you would have to copy, and which likely required patented processes to reproduce.

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Do you have evidence for the assertion that it was to kill of OpenOffice.

Basic backwards compatibility demands that, if you are going to swap the file format to use an open standard, then the open standard had better be able to represent all existing documents, otherwise your existing customers are going to be very unhappy. I'm fairly sure the competing format, ODF, which I assume is what you are referring to, wasn't fully able to capture all existing MS Office documents - and that would alone provide a very strong motivation for MS to develop its own format which is open but based on being able to represent existing documents fully. I would say that "essentially just thousands of pages documenting weird historical bugs " is a huge exaggeration - I've worked with Office Open XML and a large part of it is basically about representing stuff that you'd want in normal documents and spreadsheets etc., albeit strongly geared towards the existing structure of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Yes, there's some stuff that is to cope with historical eccentricities - and I do think MS could have found a better way to deal with those, but I can' knock them for including them because otherwise it would've broken lots of older dpcuments/

DynamicSpirit said:

How did Governments mandate open-ness? Was MS somehow forced to open up the Word/Excel/Powerpoint with an ECMA standard? That seems unlikely to me since other products - such as Access and Outlook remained proprietary, with access to the date in the files only available through APIs.



Do you have evidence for the assertion that it was to kill of OpenOffice.

Basic backwards compatibility demands that, if you are going to swap the file format to use an open standard, then the open standard had better be able to represent all existing documents, otherwise your existing customers are going to be very unhappy. I'm fairly sure the competing format, ODF, which I assume is what you are referring to, wasn't fully able to capture all existing MS Office documents - and that would alone provide a very strong motivation for MS to develop its own format which is open but based on being able to represent existing documents fully. I would say that "essentially just thousands of pages documenting weird historical bugs " is a huge exaggeration - I've worked with Office Open XML and a large part of it is basically about representing stuff that you'd want in normal documents and spreadsheets etc., albeit strongly geared towards the existing structure of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Yes, there's some stuff that is to cope with historical eccentricities - and I do think MS could have found a better way to deal with those, but I can' knock them for including them because otherwise it would've broken lots of older dpcuments/

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Honestly, think what you like, but your view of Microsoft appears to be rose-tinted to the point of absurd. If you were employed as a developer at the time then all the relevant information was available to you. If you still can't see it I'm not going to refight a 15 year old battle for your entertainment. Have a wonderful day

takno said:

Honestly, think what you like, but your view of Microsoft appears to be rose-tinted to the point of absurd. If you were employed as a developer at the time then all the relevant information was available to you. If you still can't see it I'm not going to refight a 15 year old battle for your entertainment. Have a wonderful day

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That reads like a way of saying 'I have no substantive evidence or arguments to back up my claim that your opinions are mistaken and MS is bad, so I'll just insult your opinions instead'

DynamicSpirit said:

How did Governments mandate open-ness? Was MS somehow forced to open up the Word/Excel/Powerpoint with an ECMA standard? That seems unlikely to me since other products - such as Access and Outlook remained proprietary, with access to the date in the files only available through APIs.

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They mandated it, by... mandating it. In 2005 the state of Massachusets was one of the first to mandate use of an open format for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations(database and e-mail have never been a part of this). Subsequently many more governments started looking into mandating the use of open formats. Microsoft were furious, since this threatened their position as the only vendor offering full compatibility with what was effectively standard up to that point(doc/xls/ppt) but they had no chance of winning any argument that their proprietary format should be favoured over an open one as a standard for government use. They fought back with "Office Open XML", which they then got adopted as an international standard. The standardisation process was highly controversial, as many people felt it was rushed through without proper review, purely to serve Microsoft's commercial interests so they could then frame the argument as one open standard against another, whilst in reality on a tecnical it would be virtually impossible for any other company to implement fully.

DynamicSpirit said:

I'm fairly sure the competing format, ODF, which I assume is what you are referring to, wasn't fully able to capture all existing MS Office documents - and that would alone provide a very strong motivation for MS to develop its own format which is open but based on being able to represent existing documents fully.

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Generally if a standard doesn't do what you want, you extend it. For example, OpenGL, HTML, CSS etc. You don't create you own, entirely seperate 'standard'. Google did the same, with HTTP/2, and faced the same accusations that they were trying to push their own proprietary technology as a standard.

DynamicSpirit said:

I've worked with Office Open XML and a large part of it is basically about representing stuff that you'd want in normal documents and spreadsheets etc., albeit strongly geared towards the existing structure of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Yes, there's some stuff that is to cope with historical eccentricities - and I do think MS could have found a better way to deal with those, but I can' knock them for including them because otherwise it would've broken lots of older dpcuments/

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We can agree then, that Office Open XML is file format created by Microsoft, for Microsoft, with the primary goal being interoperability with Microsoft products at the expense of everything else. I hope you can understand then, why Microsoft's push to have it as 'global open standard' for office document interchange, which other vendors would have to support fully in order to be competitive, was so controversial.

Microsoft: More evil than the Nazi's!

Might the thread title be a bit wibbletastic?

DynamicSpirit said:

I'm fairly sure the competing format, ODF, which I assume is what you are referring to, wasn't fully able to capture all existing MS Office documents - and that would alone provide a very strong motivation for MS to develop its own format which is open but based on being able to represent existing documents fully.

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Pre Office XML, many (most?) MS Office file formats had been simple copies of the RAM that held the document when Word (etc.) was running, as opposed to a properly specified file format. This changed every time the program was redesigned. This is why you had the choice of saving your document as a Word 5, Word 95/97, or Word 2000, etc. file.

Competitors to MS (and this includes the likes of Corel and Sun) had to reverse-engineer how MS applications were structured in order to be able to read the files. Not always with complete success. They could work with their own proprietary formats just fine, but MS generally saw no need to support these formats in MS Office.

OpenOffice was just another of these competitors, with the exception that they made the specification of the document structure openly available. ODF formats couldn't do everything that MS ones could, but then MS ones couldn't do everything the ODF ones did either.

As described, it was individual governments that (when lobbied) passed laws requiring the use of open file formats that anyone could read. That's not too radical, compared to Freedom of Information legislation we have in the UK.

Microsoft's reaction was to come up with a new, open specification of their own, to stop people from having to switch away from MS Office. A perfectly reasonable act of self-preservation from the company.

87 027 said:

I wonder if Google lived up to their (then) "don't be evil" motto in the saga of blocking the YouTube app for Windows Phone.

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They're continuing the trend with web based apps. If you try to use Edge to use Google Docs, Maps or Youtube, some features are broken and sometimes the website fails completely.
Some of my colleagues that use Safari on iOS and Mac have also had problems using Google services on the browser.
Firefox also suffer the same issues, but the open-source community is fast to curb Google's enthusiasm.

Microsoft is being the nice guy now because it has a reputation to rewrite and a rival that has become the synonym for Internet and, for some, even IT.
Facebook is also in the corner to take over the populace mindset about what technology is, by sponsoring the introduction and expansion of some ISPs and having Facebook installed by default on their carrier-locked phones, and Facebook login in several other websites.
Microsoft is also using Apple's hardware mishaps in its favour. The moment they unveiled the Surface Pro was already an answer to what people wanted out of the iPad against what they've got from Apple.

DynamicSpirit said:

As someone who's worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years, I really struggle to understand why people object to Microsoft. Sure, they are a very large company and I doubt any large company has a perfect record, but my experience is that they seem pretty cool at keeping their software relatively open, and on those occasions when I've interacted with MS software development teams, I've found them very keen to interact with consumers and to improve their products.

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The first language I ever used professionally was C#, at a Windows/SQL Server/ASP.NET MVC shop but I've used Linux personally for much longer. At the time, this forced me to use Windows at work in order to do development work and my productivity was undoubtedly worse as a result. Despite recent advances, I still think Windows is a poor platform to do development from (but this is an entirely subjective opinion from someone so used to using Linux on the desktop that Windows is a pain whenever I use it).

Nowadays, yes Microsoft are more open (and they should be applauded to this) - to an extent. I will note though that this isn't universal - the debugger for the .NET Core ecosystem is not open source which caused JetBrains some headaches and forced them to reimplement it.

But, as others have alluded to, Microsoft never used to have a reputation for developing in the open, licensing code under a free software license and supporting other platforms (Linux etc). Particularly under Ballmer and previous CEOs. EEE was a real strategy and at least historically there's always been a desire to shy away from true cross-compatibility. @takno brought up some excellent points with regard to the Office file formats.

From Bill Gates:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy—allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities. Anything else is suicide for our platform

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They also spread a ton of misinformation to consumers within the last decade:





This historical activity is why a lot of people are wary to trust Microsoft, even in 2019.

As a web developer, IE has also caused me many headaches and I loathe having to support it. Thankfully its market share has substantially declined.

DynamicSpirit said:

If I plug my Android phone into a Windows machine, transferring files just works - apparently because both Microsoft and Google are reasonably committed to inter-operability. On the other hand, when friends of mine try to plug iPhones into Windows machines, transferring files is an absolute nightmare - which appears to because Apple just aren't interested in working with rival operating systems.

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It's painful on Linux too, so I suspect you're right. I have no love for Apple - I don't see that it's a one-or-the-other situation. Safari does my head in almost as much as Internet Explorer when it comes to support for web standards, iPhones are deliberately crippled [see: NFC, sideloading, browser engines, dev environment OS support] (and expensive!) devices and Apple often seem to favour form over function.

Wow, I didn't expect this to turn into a full discussion about office document standards! I'm actually really impressed that railforums has such expertise on such a niche subject. But then I guess having so many well informed people here is the main reason I hang around here so much

JonathanP said:

They mandated it, by... mandating it. In 2005 the state of Massachusets was one of the first to mandate use of an open format for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations(database and e-mail have never been a part of this).

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OK, so looking at that, I guess by 'mandated' you don't meant that the Government legally forced MS to adopt some standard. You mean that they decided they were going to use an open standard for all the documents that they produced. And since Governments are such big customers, MS presumably responded by making sure there was an open standard capable of representing all their own document formats - for fear of otherwise losing a lot of business. Correct?

Having said that, having read the other links you've provided, I'd agree that they do seem to show the way MS pushed their standard was at best iffy.

JonathanP said:

Generally if a standard doesn't do what you want, you extend it. For example, OpenGL, HTML, CSS etc. You don't create you own, entirely seperate 'standard'. Google did the same, with HTTP/2, and faced the same accusations that they were trying to push their own proprietary technology as a standard.

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Yes, you'd extend it IF the standard lends itself to easily being extended to cover the stuff you need to use it for. I'm not sure if that's the case for ODF and Microsoft documents - because I don't know the specs in that much detail

krus_aragon said:

Pre Office XML, many (most?) MS Office file formats had been simple copies of the RAM that held the document when Word (etc.) was running, as opposed to a properly specified file format. This changed every time the program was redesigned. This is why you had the choice of saving your document as a Word 5, Word 95/97, or Word 2000, etc. file.

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Yep. That of course sounds like an awful practice by today's standards, but it's perhaps worth pointing out that it made a lot of sense at the time: The first versions of Office were written at a time when computers were massively slower than today. And having the file format be a simple copy of the RAM meant you didn't need to do any processing to convert the file format when you loaded and saved documents - and in those days that would have had a big impact on application startup times. Also, there was no public Internet to speak of: Many documents would have only ever been loaded on one single computer, and if they were transferred to other computers, it would have normally been via floppy disc. Hence, inter-operability between systems would have been a very low priority in most desktop software, so little need for documented open standards. So you probably can't really fault MS for doing things the way they did at that time.

krus_aragon said:

Microsoft's reaction was to come up with a new, open specification of their own, to stop people from having to switch away from MS Office. A perfectly reasonable act of self-preservation from the company.

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I'd agree - and to some extent that's probably the thing here: Microsoft, just like Apple, Google, and all sorts of other companies, have to look at their own self preservation and keeping their market share. The question really is to what extent they balance doing that with acting ethically.

DynamicSpirit said:

OK, so looking at that, I guess by 'mandated' you don't meant that the Government legally forced MS to adopt some standard. You mean that they decided they were going to use an open standard for all the documents that they produced. And since Governments are such big customers, MS presumably responded by making sure there was an open standard capable of representing all their own document formats - for fear of otherwise losing a lot of business. Correct?

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That's my understanding of the situation.

DynamicSpirit said:

Yep. That of course sounds like an awful practice by today's standards, but it's perhaps worth pointing out that it made a lot of sense at the time:

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Agreed. But it left them with an awkward legacy situation to handle, and was a stumbling block for competitors for a while.

krus_aragon said:

Agreed. But it left them with an awkward legacy situation to handle, and was a stumbling block for competitors for a while.

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Serious question for a moment - as a proprietary software company, at what point do you have to consider competitors access to your internal file formats as a requirement? Obviously everyone agrees Office surpassed that point, but what about other software? Should all of Adobe's Creative Suite products (photoshop / premiere / etc) be required to use open standards for their file formats, as they hold a close to monopoly position?

dosxuk said:

Serious question for a moment - as a proprietary software company, at what point do you have to consider competitors access to your internal file formats as a requirement? Obviously everyone agrees Office surpassed that point, but what about other software? Should all of Adobe's Creative Suite products (photoshop / premiere / etc) be required to use open standards for their file formats, as they hold a close to monopoly position?

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Having had a short think, the only times that such a company would have to consider sharing their proprietary file format structures would be if they want other companies to make compatible systems, or if a customer desires it. Some related examples of the first case would be Sun/Oracle making the API of their Java programming language publicly available (or nobody will code for it), or Microsoft licensing their FAT/exFAT file systems to digital camera manufacturers.

Microsoft could have continued using their closed file format without legal penalty, it's just that they could have lost customers as a result.

With regards to a monopoly position, it's notable that the anti-trust lawsuits they were hit with in the USA were not about them having a monopoly in the first place, but about levaraging their monopoly in the Desktop OS market to force a monopoly in the Web Browser market as well.

DynamicSpirit said:

As someone who's worked with Microsoft technologies for over 20 years, I really struggle to understand why people object to Microsoft.

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Try going back 30 years or so to when I was a youth. It was a very different Microsoft back then.

A leopard without spots is still a leopard.

DynamicSpirit said:

Do you have evidence for the assertion that it [the OOXML format] was to kill of OpenOffice.

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Of course it was, to kill not just Sun's OpenOffice but any other rival office software. I followed this sordid affair at the time. The ODF file format had been adopted by the ISO and there was hope that this open standard would allow other software houses to enter the office software market. There was no reason why Microsoft could not adapt its own software to include the ODF format too, but the playing field would be levelled. At the same time, some organisations, particularly government bodies, began to make noises that open file formats for documents were needed so as not to be at the financial mercy and whim of one software company (ie MS), and with a view to the long term readability of archives.

The ISO approval of ODF was Microsoft's worst nightmare. Their monopoly in the office software market was heavily reliant on their closed proprietory file formats - eg if you email a document to another company they will complain if they cannot read it, so if you had created it in MS Word you would then nag them that they should get MS Word too, in order to do so. Thus having got a majority position in the market, MS was able to turn that majority into a monopoly with its own customers acting as its unpaid advocates - brilliant. The Open Document Format - a universal file format - threatened to undermine that "enviable" MS position.

Therefore shortly after the ISO approved the ODF, MS proposed their own claimed "open" format, OOXML, which they "fast tracked" through the ISO by skullduggery. The way the ISO worked was basically through its national committees which, it transpired, anyone in the industry could join. MS therefore "persuaded" its numerous partners (companies like PC and other hardware makers, and small software houses dependent on MS) to join these committees in droves throughout the World, and vote OOXML through at the national committees' level. There were stories of the regular national ISO committee members not even being able to get into the meeting room, finding it already packed full of newly joined MS partner stooges. Thus we now have two ISO standards for documents, introduced at about the same time and for exactly the same purpose; that's nonsense.

In fact, the "open" OOXML format was a massive document and not in the nature or language of a standard at all. It was more like a technical description of the inner working of MS Office, but an incomplete one at that. In numerous places it simply resorted to phrases essentially saying things like "Format bullet point lists like Word does". It is not believed that anybody outside MS had actually read its 7000+ pages before the vote was taken. It was almost useless as a standard and that is how MS wanted it to be. It was simply to allow MS to keep those government contracts that now required "open document formats".

DynamicSpirit said:

Basic backwards compatibility demands that, if you are going to swap the file format to use an open standard, then the open standard had better be able to represent all existing documents

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First of all, a new standard does not have to include backwards compatibity. Metric screw threads are not backward compatible with Imperial screw threads. But anyway I'm not sure you understand the purpose of a standard - it the the job of the software, not the file format, to present the content and layout of the document. For example there is no reason whatever why MS could not include in Word the ability to recognise an older Word format (from 1995 say) and render it on screen or paper correctly, and to save files in that old format or in ODF, or any other, with ODF being the default to meet those government contract requirements.

I use LibreOffice and it offers a wide choice of formats to read from and write to (even including OOXML) and I'm sure MS have the expertise to do the same - perhaps they do so in Office, I don't know, you tell me, I don't use it. There was and remains no good reason for OOXML to exist and no reason why MS could not have been involved, as a major software house, with the ongoing maintenance of the ODF format alongside IBM, Apple, the OSF, etc.

DynamicSpirit said:

I would say that "essentially just thousands of pages documenting weird historical bugs " is a huge exaggeration

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What is the exaggeration? The OOXML spec does indeed have thousands of pages (over 7000 according to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML ) and in places it resorts to saying "I give up, its too hard to explain, and we are not even sure ourselves how it works, but just frigging do it the way that Word does it". I'm paraphrasing.

I love Microsoft - because I like standards -anywhere in the world in many languages I can still use the same key strokes. The vast majority use Microsoft. I think they do a good job overall. I am happy to buy them all the time.

w

GRALISTAIR said:

I love Microsoft - because I like standards -anywhere in the world in many languages I can still use the same key strokes.

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I'm still using a lot of keyboard shortcuts I learnt in the 90s: even though modern UI philosophies say the accelerator keys aren't underline any more, they still work. And that's on non-Microsoft operating systems, and non-Microsoft software these days. A few have gone by the wayside, though: "Win, Up, Enter, Enter" doesn't shut a Windows machine down any more since they redesigned their Start Menu.

When working as a supply teacher with a class in a computer room, it was great to be able to walk past a computer that had whatever web-based game open, briefly touch the keyboard, say "back to work please", and carry on walking past before the pupil could protest!

(That would have been Alt-F4 for closing the current window, but with modern tabbed browsers the shortcut Ctrl-W to close the current tab is better, as then the kids don't have the counter-protest of "you closed the tabs I was working with as well, so you've lost my work". Naturally, I didn't teach them these shortcuts, as I could imagine the chaos if they started leaning over to use them on each others' keyboards...)

krus_aragon said:

w
I'm still using a lot of keyboard shortcuts I learnt in the 90s:

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My personal favourite - when in MS Word I often in error do all capitals as in OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE WE HERE - but put a cursor anywhere on the block and do shift F3 and presto all lower case - do it again and only initial word capitalized and again and all capitalized again. Love it