> The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx
It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky that Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as OpenOffice.org's (LibreOffice's direct ancestor) hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MS Office finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever.
I highly doubt anyone except extremely technically literate individuals even heard of "Office Open XML" or "OOXML". To the average person, .docx is just the newer .doc
I think you are mixing up some things. There are no "likeword95" attributes.
At one point during standardization there was a proposal to add several attributes with names like that although most of them referred to non-Microsoft products like WordPerfect, but it didn't make it into the final standard. That's what you are probably thinking of.
Their purpose was to allow someone writing say a WordPerfect to OOXML converter to mark in the OOXML places that were using some specific WordPerfect formatting that couldn't be replicated in OOXML.
OOXML word processors were supposed to preserve those markings if they encountered them but never add them.
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.
One sentence that stood out to me from there was this:
> The bottom line is that there are thousands of developer years of work that went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do thousands of years of work.
This is blatantly not true. Only a small portion of all those "thousands of developer-years" is going to be actively present in these products at whatever point in time, as a lot of those developer-years are spent on replacing the output of other developer-years.
It's the difference between 117 billion humans ever having lived, and 8 billion humans currently living (and just some number of millions at any point in time before the industrial revolution - we've been around for a while, supposedly).
And this is still ignoring that someone looking to reimplement Office would be racing towards something pre-existing, rather than trying to come up with it in the first place. A lot of those developer-hours were spent on design and research, rather than rote implementation.
Microsoft may have the deep pockets, but there are Word documents that LibreOffice opens correctly, MS Word 2007 opens correctly, and MS Word 2024 doesn't.
As AI tools become more dominant, businesses are going to want their documents to be fully read by their AI in whatever format they are in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fight over all of this brewing in the next couple of years.
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.
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.
They even do that with ISO C. They claim that portable functions like strlen are deprecated and insecure, and their recommended replacements are MSVC-specific.
I don't think anyone is under the impression that Microsoft is integrating with projects like git or linux out of the goodness of their heart. They do it for the exact same reason anyone does - thats were users/customers are, and they want to make money from them. This isn't some evil conspiracy, it's just normal boring ways to build products for people.
Honestly, having worked on Excel at Microsoft (though pretty far from the file format and a long time after OOXML was introduced), I'm pretty sure that the structure of OOXML is convoluted because it was easier to align with the data structures used by the app.
. . . 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.
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.
This is an old problem that is still harming the user freedom and hinders the adoption of LibreOffice today, due to Microsoft's anti-competitive practices. Are you saying it's not worth discussing?
As a user, I'd make that argument for sure. The casual user simply wants the least friction, Microsoft doesn't care, and the FOSS developer space just has to live in this environment. As part of a broader argument to develop for and use FOSS, there's maybe something worth thinking about here, but Microsoft's not going to change its ways on this even if a dozen of us complain.
I was annoyed about the Chrome/FF thing recently (well, annoyed by Chrome, and annoyed as a casual user by Firefox's relative inabilities), so thought about what it'd take to make a new web browser. It's FAR too complicated; there is way too much to implement. HTML/JS/CSS are excessively complex, made for use cases ~nobody will run into, and you pretty much are required to implement everything Chrome does for compatibility. It's crazy Firefox even exists.
I decided instead, as an exercise, to implement an entirely new Internet built on CrypticWeb running the Mystic Beaver Protocol (MBP); surely you've heard of these, they are very big in my household. It's very simple; instead of forking the Internet to add even more garbage, we start from scratch. Instead of JS, we use waterwheel (.ww) files which patch the python script running on the stateful lodge server. I even ported the server to Micropython and can run it on a tiny ESP32C6 that fits on my pinky. The client's written in Python and interprets the simple JSON payloads the server sends over, to render it and interact with the server as needed.
It all works fine, but people are locked into this overcomplicated Bad/Legacy/Corporate/Devil Internet. big smh; wake up, sheeple!
Microsoft Office isn't even compatible with itself, deapite its bespoke file format. For example formulas in Excel not being portable between different languages.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Latterly, I worked at a predominantly open source company that switched from LibreOffice to Google Docs over the screams of many. It was a night and day improvement both in terms of the software itself and the ability to collaborate.
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?
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
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.
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?
Readit News
It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky that Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as OpenOffice.org's (LibreOffice's direct ancestor) hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MS Office finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever.
https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)
https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)
microsoft made a total piece of steaming turd, and its users dont care.
At one point during standardization there was a proposal to add several attributes with names like that although most of them referred to non-Microsoft products like WordPerfect, but it didn't make it into the final standard. That's what you are probably thinking of.
Their purpose was to allow someone writing say a WordPerfect to OOXML converter to mark in the OOXML places that were using some specific WordPerfect formatting that couldn't be replicated in OOXML.
OOXML word processors were supposed to preserve those markings if they encountered them but never add them.
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
> The bottom line is that there are thousands of developer years of work that went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do thousands of years of work.
This is blatantly not true. Only a small portion of all those "thousands of developer-years" is going to be actively present in these products at whatever point in time, as a lot of those developer-years are spent on replacing the output of other developer-years.
It's the difference between 117 billion humans ever having lived, and 8 billion humans currently living (and just some number of millions at any point in time before the industrial revolution - we've been around for a while, supposedly).
And this is still ignoring that someone looking to reimplement Office would be racing towards something pre-existing, rather than trying to come up with it in the first place. A lot of those developer-hours were spent on design and research, rather than rote implementation.
Only if Word formats remain dominant. There might be hope with the EU moving off Word that an alternative, real standard might take root.
Lawyers also tend to pore a lot, so it's worth getting the word right! ;-)
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.
I was annoyed about the Chrome/FF thing recently (well, annoyed by Chrome, and annoyed as a casual user by Firefox's relative inabilities), so thought about what it'd take to make a new web browser. It's FAR too complicated; there is way too much to implement. HTML/JS/CSS are excessively complex, made for use cases ~nobody will run into, and you pretty much are required to implement everything Chrome does for compatibility. It's crazy Firefox even exists.
I decided instead, as an exercise, to implement an entirely new Internet built on CrypticWeb running the Mystic Beaver Protocol (MBP); surely you've heard of these, they are very big in my household. It's very simple; instead of forking the Internet to add even more garbage, we start from scratch. Instead of JS, we use waterwheel (.ww) files which patch the python script running on the stateful lodge server. I even ported the server to Micropython and can run it on a tiny ESP32C6 that fits on my pinky. The client's written in Python and interprets the simple JSON payloads the server sends over, to render it and interact with the server as needed.
It all works fine, but people are locked into this overcomplicated Bad/Legacy/Corporate/Devil Internet. big smh; wake up, sheeple!
Dead Comment
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
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.
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?
Maybe they could even release the source under a copyleft license, so the students can learn from it and maybe contribute.
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?