4 ms·

I call bullshit. A lot of his arguments perhaps make sense for early versions of Office, but for '97 and later? It didn't occur to anyone on the Word or Excel t

I call bullshit. A lot of his arguments perhaps make sense for early versions of Office, but for '97 and later? It didn't occur to anyone on the Word or Excel teams in 1997 that maybe interoperability would be an issue? I really enjoy Joel's blog, but sometimes I can't stand the clubbish-ness of the old-school Microsoft brigade. "We were a bunch of geniuses, doing the best we could..." Yeah, well, the software is usable, but it kinda sucks. Don't be surprised if the people MS victimized for a decade sound critical now that we can all see how the sausage gets made.

spolsky 19y ago
Sure, they realized interoperability would be important. But by 1995 customers were already whining about how often the file format changed. Nobody would buy Office (n+1) if it would start writing documents in a format that Office (n) didn't understand, because interoperability means precisely that you can't get everyone to upgrade at the same time. So they did a remarkably good job of holding the file formats stable and backwards and forwards compatible for about ten years. Look in the Excel spec and you'll see how much work when into allowing old verisons of Excel to preserve and roundtrip future features they don't understand.
- mojuba 19y ago
  Ok, then take a look at how HTML does forward compatibility, for example. Extremely simple, elegant. Not that i defend lexable-parsable formats - I got the point that speed was important on stone-age computers. No. It's about architecture. Here is what I think: nobody at Microsoft ever cared about making anything simpler than what they got after the first approximation, because complexity looks impressive and hence sells better. On the other hand, making things simpler requires more intellectual efforts and usually doesn't sell well, especially in the consumer product business.
- brlewis 19y ago
  Interoperability does not mean forward/backward compatibility for releases of a single vendor's software. Forward/backward compatibility does not require a lot of work or intellect, unless you're deliberately obfuscating your format.
xirium 19y ago
I agree. This is bullshit. Xerox PARC solved a superset of these compatability problems by 1985. It was called InterScript ( http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5455 http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5455 ) and it allows editors to preserve unknown elements within compound documents. This makes downward compatability quite trivial.

spolsky 19y ago

Sure, they realized interoperability would be important. But by 1995 customers were already whining about how often the file format changed. Nobody would buy Office (n+1) if it would start writing documents in a format that Office (n) didn't understand, because interoperability means precisely that you can't get everyone to upgrade at the same time. So they did a remarkably good job of holding the file formats stable and backwards and forwards compatible for about ten years. Look in the Excel spec and you'll see how much work when into allowing old verisons of Excel to preserve and roundtrip future features they don't understand.

mojuba 19y ago
Ok, then take a look at how HTML does forward compatibility, for example. Extremely simple, elegant. Not that i defend lexable-parsable formats - I got the point that speed was important on stone-age computers. No. It's about architecture. Here is what I think: nobody at Microsoft ever cared about making anything simpler than what they got after the first approximation, because complexity looks impressive and hence sells better. On the other hand, making things simpler requires more intellectual efforts and usually doesn't sell well, especially in the consumer product business.
brlewis 19y ago
Interoperability does not mean forward/backward compatibility for releases of a single vendor's software. Forward/backward compatibility does not require a lot of work or intellect, unless you're deliberately obfuscating your format.

xirium 19y ago

I agree. This is bullshit. Xerox PARC solved a superset of these compatability problems by 1985. It was called InterScript ( http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5455 http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5455 ) and it allows editors to preserve unknown elements within compound documents. This makes downward compatability quite trivial.