This is the real reason. Put your data in the MS format roach motel, and it's a challenge to ever get it out with full fidelity. The mid-oughts battle over th

This is the real reason. Put your data in the MS format roach motel, and it's a challenge to ever get it out with full fidelity. The mid-oughts battle over this in the international standardizations space is pretty fraught: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... And even now, even though there is a "standard" and schemas for, MS's apps mostly ignore them, or use undocumented extensions (as far as I'm aware), so it the whole thing was truly straight from MS's embrace/extend/extinguish playbook.