4 ms·

Slightly off-topic but serious question: Why we have only Microsoft formats for the office documents. Why the open document formats have really bad tooling, why

Slightly off-topic but serious question: Why we have only Microsoft formats for the office documents. Why the open document formats have really bad tooling, why are we not moving to OD ? What will it take to move ?

hirako2000 6y ago
Because Office grabbed the vast majority of users, and that for decades. Open formats never got the same level of adoption as Office. You are free to move, it would mostly be compatible with Office when you have to send your work to some friend who only uses Windows and MS tools. What it will take to move is growing adoption of open formats for office documents, many people have moved decades ago, but the tooling quality is in proportion to the user base size
- codegladiator 6y ago
  How do you think I can help push adoption ? Is there a possibility of moving to a different format (non xml based) say html for docs and json for xls and so on ?
  - cxr 6y ago
    There is, but it's not trivial. I elaborated on a better strategy for displacing Microsoft Office and its formats a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918
chillfox 6y ago
1. The open source office suites actually having a good user interface. 2. There being a company that you can pay for support. Corporations/governments can be absolutely paranoid about needing support (even when it is often unused for years). 3. Lots of marketing. 4. 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office.
cxr 6y ago
Because the charter of projects like LibreOffice are fundamentally broken—they're aiming to replace Microsoft Office by cloning it, but Microsoft Office itself is part of a busted paradigm. It reminds me of that old quote from Linus Torvalds about why distributed version control schemes are worthwhile whereas migrating to Subversion is not—because Subversion aimed to be "CVS done right", and that's a fundamentally flawed premise. You need to make something better that fixes what's wrong with the first thing, and make it obvious/unavoidable what the flaws of the first thing were. To displace Microsoft Office, it isn't enough to try to clone it. (Even if you could, Microsoft Office really only persists due to its own momentum, anyway.) Microsoft Office is a digital approximation of a paper-based paradigm, but it's not really great at either one of those things. The Web and its plaintext formats are way better for sharing and interoperability than MS Office formats. Some fans of MS Office will dispute this, but they're not being honest with themselves. The fans who aren't lying to themselves will instead point out that it's better for print, but it's only better for print in comparison to the Web. If you're actually serious about print, then TeX and PDF/PostScript are better. But most stuff created in Microsoft office isn't ever really intended for print, anyway. So what gives? Microsoft Office succeeds despite being mediocre on both measures because while the alternatives each have things that make them better in their strong suit, they fail at the things they aren't strong at. Microsoft Office squeaks by because it's able to get a C in all its classes, whereas the others remain well-liked among their friends and family, but they don't get to graduate.

hirako2000 6y ago

Because Office grabbed the vast majority of users, and that for decades. Open formats never got the same level of adoption as Office. You are free to move, it would mostly be compatible with Office when you have to send your work to some friend who only uses Windows and MS tools. What it will take to move is growing adoption of open formats for office documents, many people have moved decades ago, but the tooling quality is in proportion to the user base size

codegladiator 6y ago
How do you think I can help push adoption ? Is there a possibility of moving to a different format (non xml based) say html for docs and json for xls and so on ?
- cxr 6y ago
  There is, but it's not trivial. I elaborated on a better strategy for displacing Microsoft Office and its formats a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795918

chillfox 6y ago

1. The open source office suites actually having a good user interface. 2. There being a company that you can pay for support. Corporations/governments can be absolutely paranoid about needing support (even when it is often unused for years). 3. Lots of marketing. 4. 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office.

cxr 6y ago

Because the charter of projects like LibreOffice are fundamentally broken—they're aiming to replace Microsoft Office by cloning it, but Microsoft Office itself is part of a busted paradigm. It reminds me of that old quote from Linus Torvalds about why distributed version control schemes are worthwhile whereas migrating to Subversion is not—because Subversion aimed to be "CVS done right", and that's a fundamentally flawed premise. You need to make something better that fixes what's wrong with the first thing, and make it obvious/unavoidable what the flaws of the first thing were. To displace Microsoft Office, it isn't enough to try to clone it. (Even if you could, Microsoft Office really only persists due to its own momentum, anyway.) Microsoft Office is a digital approximation of a paper-based paradigm, but it's not really great at either one of those things. The Web and its plaintext formats are way better for sharing and interoperability than MS Office formats. Some fans of MS Office will dispute this, but they're not being honest with themselves. The fans who aren't lying to themselves will instead point out that it's better for print, but it's only better for print in comparison to the Web. If you're actually serious about print, then TeX and PDF/PostScript are better. But most stuff created in Microsoft office isn't ever really intended for print, anyway. So what gives? Microsoft Office succeeds despite being mediocre on both measures because while the alternatives each have things that make them better in their strong suit, they fail at the things they aren't strong at. Microsoft Office squeaks by because it's able to get a C in all its classes, whereas the others remain well-liked among their friends and family, but they don't get to graduate.