LibreOffice Once Again Slams Microsoft For Using 'Lock-In' With Office Files (xda-developers.com)
- Reference: 0184517408
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/07/20/0431217/libreoffice-once-again-slams-microsoft-for-using-lock-in-with-office-files
- Source link: https://www.xda-developers.com/libreoffice-once-again-slams-microsoft-for-using-lock-in-with-office-files/
> One of the founding members of The Document Foundation and handler of LibreOffice's PR and media relations, Italo Vignoli, took to the LibreOffice blog to [1]call out Microsoft's practices with its Office application . The last time we saw Vignoli take to the stage, we saw him [2]accusing Euro-Office of being just as bad as Microsoft with its practices. Vignoli's [3]new post focuses entirely on Microsoft's strategy. He says that "the dominant format for office documents" is owned by Microsoft Office, particularly the DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats. The problem with these formats, Vignoli states, is that they "belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft's interest." This makes it difficult for other formats to take hold.
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> Vignoli explains his point by stating that open document formats don't hide anything. People developing their own apps can use the format to both read and write the document format with perfection. Meanwhile, proprietary formats such as Microsoft's "contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviors" that developers can't fully adapt to. That means that a presentation that looks great in the source software comes out strange when rebuilt in a third-party app. This, Vignoli says, is a huge issue [...]. Vignoli claims this creates a huge issue with document preservation. If a Word document was saved in one version of Office, will it still be readable in 20 years? Microsoft has added legacy support to its software before, but the company can one day decide that it's not worth the effort anymore and cut it out. When that happens, you have old documents that are either jumbled or unable to be opened at all.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/libreoffice-once-again-slams-microsoft-for-using-lock-in-with-office-files/
[2] https://ground.news/article/libreoffice-weighs-in-on-euro-office-and-eu-digital-sovereignty
[3] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/
What do you expect? (Score:2)
What do you expect from a company that tries to lock you in its ecosystem?
Same as Apple, Google, Amazon and other large corporations, each in their own way, with anticompetitive practices.
It's called vendor lock-in, and if they could, they would lock you even more in their walled garden.
Re: (Score:3)
I was going to use Google as an example of how it should work. Chrome supports open standards, and incompatibilities are minimal because if Chrome doesn't conform to the spec it's treated as a bug and fixed. When Google wants to add new features, they go through the process of getting them added as open standards. Sometimes they fail and have to be abandoned, and Google accepts it, e.g. the pseudo-anonymous ad impression reporting tech they developed.
Google actually has an open standard for spreadsheet prog
Microsoft already abonded Microsoft Write files (Score:3)
Microsoft Write was included with Windows 1.0 in 1985 and was a mainstay until the release of Windows 95 when it was replaced with WordPad, which at first supported the .wri files, but that ended in 2004. Since then no Microsoft product has included the ability to read the old Microsoft Write .wri files, which were quite prevalent back in the day.
Re: Microsoft already abonded Microsoft Write file (Score:1)
Don't forget Microsoft Works as well
And not body thought to use the ADOBE word? (Score:2)
as if there are not 50 other major software/services that do the same. Ever try to share an Illustrator file?
Microsoft: Keep paying more. (Score:2)
Microsoft
Micro-Soft
Hugely-Hard
I'm Sure That This Really Hurts Their Feelings (Score:2)
Leave Microsoft alonnnne!!!