3 ms·

I heard that they lock data by using proprietary formats. MSFT does not do that.

• easterncalculus 6mo ago
  They literally did. XLS was proprietary until Microsoft completely cornered the spreadsheet software market.
  • drnick1 6mo ago
    People should not use proprietary formats for obvious reasons, but XLS has been largely reverse engineered.
  • nradov 6mo ago
    In fairness to Microsoft, when the XLS file format was first defined about 40 years ago all of their competitors also used proprietary file formats. Back then open file formats for complex, structured data weren't really a thing. I suppose in theory they could have used SGML but that wouldn't have been very practical given the severely limited hardware resources at the time.
• vovavili 6mo ago
  Locking users behind proprietary data formats is _literally_ the sole point of Microsoft Office.
• crimsoneer 6mo ago
  They very much do not, you can import/export in pretty much any format you want and they've got a well documented sdk. https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-osdk https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology-sdk/python-os...