I wrote a bit about this in another place, but the key to understanding the situation is to understand that the file format does not actually tell you how to fo

I wrote a bit about this in another place, but the key to understanding the situation is to understand that the file format does not actually tell you how to format the text. Especially in the early days when rendering a font would work completely differently in each application because you never knew what font metrics they were using. It's easier to be second to market because you can copy the leader. In this case, if you write your formatter with the intention of importing documents from the leader, then you always have a target. If you then add features which the leader ignores, suddenly they have a much more difficult time to catch up -- their formatter is not purposely built to render your file format. As I said in my other message, I've completely forgotten the Excel file format, but Word's format was originally just a binary dump of all their data structures. That's why it is insane. It's hard to read unless your code happens to be structured that way. Anyway, I'm +1000 with you on the importance of open and cross-platform standards. Just think about all those stupid rails apps -- your data model looks exactly like your sql tables. Then you dump those same stupid tables into json and splat them over the wire for someone to try to make sense of. Deja vu all over again ;-) I suppose I should be happy it's not XML...