2 ms·

> Often it is crazy well engineered, but decisions set in stone decades ago still linger on. YMMV

• com2kid 7y ago
  Well engineered and coded decisions made in the age of single user desktops are still well engineered. Hard for someone in 1995 to predict the need for a file format that supports real time coauthoring with automatic saving and complete revision control of every edit. Esp. when the target machine the code had to run on was a 486 with a slow hard drive and a tiny bit of memory. Of course Office updated their file format, but they probably did it a little bit too soon. I always wondered what would've happened if they had waited a few more years, released in 2007, so probably design started a few years prior. Talk about just being a smidgen too early for a world of unlimited(-ish) data and always on internet connections. Oops.