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PPT or PDF, with a second copy in a Prezi-specific format that preserves any nonstandard stuff? There's a lot of options of varying difficulty. But they alread

by antsar 6y ago

PPT or PDF, with a second copy in a Prezi-specific format that preserves any nonstandard stuff? There's a lot of options of varying difficulty. But they already have code to produce PDF, and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult. If they're shy about their secret sauce, fine, encrypt that second copy. It's only for the case that this user wants to come back to the service later on. I can imagine plenty of business reasons not to do this, but very few technical ones.

deleted 6y ago
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bcrosby95 6y ago
> and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult. I feel like you're not accounting for the time and effort it takes to maintain backwards compatibility. Once you give a customer a file that uses your internal format you have to always make sure your service will be able to read it back in. Going forward you aren't maintaining just 1 format, you're maintaining N different ones.
- antsar 6y ago
  Good point. It would not be free, nor necessarily trivial/easy, to support this. But does that mean it's unreasonable to require companies to do it? We already force plenty of engineering with regulation (GDPR, HIPAA, FERPA, PCI-DSS, SOX) because these are things society wants, even if the company would rather not. Also, maybe the proprietary format doesn't need to work forever. Just add a disclaimer that it's only guaranteed for, say, 1 year? Or just "best effort"? All the file does is give the customer an incentive to return to Prezi later on. It would be in their own best interest to support this, if they weren't allowed to sidestep the whole issue by making it difficult to leave in the first place.