alt Hacker NewsLibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats
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I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life.
Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.
MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.
The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.
[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal
Its been Microsoft's strategy since its formation to make a lot of proprietary technology when it moves into any space and do so in a way that locks customers in such that if and when it is no longer the top product the customers can't easily leave. They do this in every single product and market they operate in. Where they can't ultimately win they buy their competitor and integrate the product then slowly kill it.
How did this make the HN homepage? There isn't even any news here. It is an argument about ~20-year-old XML file formats, at a time when file formats couldn't matter less?
On top of that, Office supports OpenDocument formats, just like LibreOffice supports Office formats.
Also, IME the Office XML file format is far better supported by third parties - countless apps read/write them. I have multiple apps installed that can read/write an Office file, but MS Office is the only app on my machine that opens OpenDocument.
Why does the title say "slams" but neither the headline or URL contain "slams"? I think anything that says slams is not worth reading.
It’s not just the complex XML based format. Word has collaboration tie-in’s with Skype, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive etc
It’s an entire ecosystem
Also, I have tried to use LibreOffice and you have to learn an entirely new tool. The user interfaces are different. Word has its own issues of course but LibreOffice does not feel as polished
There are things in Word that are legacy and carry overs from another time that carry various nuance. It’s not all documented set of features either
Trying to replicate the entire look and feel is incredibly difficult
Most people are going to encounter Word in a corporate setting and to have them switch to another tool is going to a big hill to climb
Original blog post by LibreOffice is here: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/07/18/artifici...
I mean… sure? When I saw this headline I was imagining that Microsoft added a brand-new ultracomplicated format. But no, the article is solely about OOXML. Why is the blog post re-litigating a fight that LibreOffice already fought almost 20 years ago?
Hasn't this always been an argument against it? I remember hearing the same arguments when we tried to get the EU to ditch OpenXML over a decade ago al least.
[0] https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
I loved OpenOffice.org back in the day, but in today's world with no modern web collaboration option it is dead. I'm aware of the attempts to make it run via browser, and no, they aren't really there, not even close.
What we need today is a web-first suite of apps that does everything Google Docs/Spreadsheets/Slides do, but uses OpenDocument family of standards as their native file format.
I know about the lack of tech-savvyness of most humans, but isn't Markdown and Pandoc—if you slam a GUI in front of it—covering the needs of 99% of users?
Granted, when you need formatting, like for a formal letter, you use a template someone made but this is not what most people use Word for.
And don't get me started on "people wouldn't understand how to put things in bold or italics"; they can barely use Word anyway. Might as well use something much simpler. Office "productivity" suites are over to me.
After having worked for many companies, I think the complex file formats is likely due to employee turnover, pressure from management to just get shit done, and careless coding. Not ill intended anti-competitive practices. The locking in is likely an unintended bonus for Microsoft.
I'd really like to see an office suite which uses .md and .csv where possible.
Mostly I use LyX and pyspread which are close/open enough.
I use Libreoffice at work to open and edit MS Office files and it works mostly fine, except for PowerPoint (missing fonts but also general madness). In general, I think the LibreOffice folks did a great job, esp. when it comes to MS file format support. And of course they need to, because I (and I guess most people) actually open more Ms files with LibreOffice than files in LOs native formats.
I can confirm. When trying convert simple Word sentences and tables to e.g. Markdown/HTML from a Word XML you need a PhD in XML edge cases and nested garbage.
It is a plague across the whole industry. The format in this case is highly influenced by how one corp designed their own products. Multiple document formats have this problem. But you can also find the exact same thing in PCI DSS and other standards. Like, one corp designed a tool to scan for a certain flaw and suddenly it is mandatory. Just ridiculous.
Meanwhile, has a better modern featureful extensible rich text format been invented?
I didn’t realise we’d entered a time machine to 2007. I’ve worked extensively with OOXML and yes, the documentation is cryptic and often absent, but Microsoft will help you out if you contact them on their forums. I see Libre Office devs there all the time!
But the complexity is not some kind of conspiracy - it’s inherent - it comes from the fact that Office is ancient and very, very complex with a huge number of features. Many features are implemented in backwards compatible way on top of the old version of similar features and then the whole thing has been back ported from a bunch of C structure to XML which has the most woeful and underpowered schema language imaginable.
I doubt this one is explicit "locking in", as much as it's reflecting the increasing internal complexity and lack of focus on product quality. I'd be willing to bet the internal teams dread working with the overly complex structures too.
Everyone needs to stop competing with Office and just build a better office.
The truth is, no one needs to be compatible these days. Everyone is either:
- using the same software company-wide, whether it's LO, Google Docs or MS Office
- exporting to PDF when sharing docs with someone outside the organization
The real thing that LO is missing is server side hosting and easy syncing... Until they get that, it's just going to be something used by individuals and small orgs.
I still remember, at my university we had LO installed on lab computers, MS Office was a "requirement" for students to purchase, but most profs simply insisted we simply hand in assignments as Google Docs links because there was incompatibilities between .doc, .docx, the formats made by LO, etc... Google Docs were the only ones that could be shared and be 100% identical on every computer with the link.
If LO had a web hosted solution and provided easy to install server code for organizations, they'd dominate. But they don't...
Never attribute malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
Microsoft isn't intentionally obfuscating the docx. Docx is a shit-show because hundreds upon hundreds of Microsoft business initiatives, executive pet projects, and ancient compatibility rules have all collided to make a giant pile of dung.
If LibreOffice is worried about what docx does to their productivity ... you should see the fucking engineers lamenting INSIDE Microsoft about what it does to their friggin productivity.
This horseshit isn't anyone's plan. This horseshit is an emergent phenomenon like a fucking termite hill in your back yard ... where no single termite is responsible or knoweldgeable, but all of them together made a pile that breaks your lawnmower.
Tangent: Is there a Firefox extension that blocks articles with slams, claps back, rips ?
Microsoft doesn't lock in people.
People lock in people.
> The two office suites take very different paths here. LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an open standard meant to be controlled by no single company. Microsoft, on the other hand, created its own Office Open XML (OOXML) to support every feature in its own software, giving us the familiar .docx and .xlsx
It's so impressively underhandedly sneaky that Microsoft named their ODF-competitor format “Office Open” just as OpenOffice.org's (LibreOffice's direct ancestor) hype peaked with OO.o 2.0 having ODF as its native format, when MS Office finally had a viable and popular competitor for like the first time ever.
https://www.openoffice.org/press/2.0/press_release.html (2005-10-20)
https://news.microsoft.com/2005/11/21/qa-microsoft-co-sponso... (2005-11-21)