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mdasentoday at 3:37 PM0 repliesview on HN

At this point?

I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.

Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.

Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.