alt Hacker NewsIts 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.
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Yah and they’ve only gotten sneakier with it. VS Code and the proprietary Pylance, remote ssh, etc
Honestly, having worked on Excel at Microsoft (though pretty far from the file format and a long time after OOXML was introduced), I'm pretty sure that the structure of OOXML is convoluted because it was easier to align with the data structures used by the app.
Gates never even made DOS. He bought it from someone else and rebranded it. He's been a con man since day 1.
It is important to remind people of this, because they imagine that MS is integrating open source projects like git, linux, and others for the goodness of their heart. It's well know that this is just step 1 of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Next step (underway) is to add many features that will work only under the MS ecosystem and finally declare those original tools as legacy that should not be allowed in corporations.