alt Hacker NewsI think TDF tries to push a wrong narrative here for their lack of engineering and funding.
Competitive products like Google Docs, WPS or Euro Office solve proprietary file format problem very nicely. Microsoft themselves had to solve that exact problem for Lotus 1-2-3.
Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features and you cannot blame your competitor to have more features or hidden features in their formats. ALL strongly competitive software for the desktop workstations have proprietary formats: Autodesk, Altium, Adobe, Corel, Apple. All of them serialize their featureset on their own format since it is the easiest to do. FOSS won't get the marketshare pie by complaining about it.
LibreOffice has to provide feature parity before complaining here and TDF needs to find the funding source to hire the engineers to achieve that. They need to have convincing arguments and consistently delivered features. Otherwise it will not get adopted.
Microsoft hasn't actually selling their product on the premise of proprietary file format support. They sell it with the promise of total platform integration for every single software an office needs. You not only get an office suite but IT Admin tooling integrates with the computers and the office suite, e-mail management, SSO and licensing management software and Cloud storage all in once.
To compete with the Microsoft (or Google Workspace) you need to be selling all of that at a very competitive price. Otherwise all private companies and many government departments will continue to choose Microsoft. If a change is wanted in the government, governments need to start investing Microsoft levels of money in hiring engineers.
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Not so much TDF as Italo Vignoli
I noticed this HN comment from four months ago and boy does it have his number:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47630474
> I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. [...] Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are [...] This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. [...]
And now I look at who authored this article. "2026-07-17 Italo Vignoli"
"Microsoft hasn't actually selling their product on the premise of proprietary file format support. They sell it with the promise of total platform integration for every single software an office needs."
Idk, the entire reason I've ever used Office was because someone gave me files I'm afraid to screw up.
Hmm - I think you mean to say that when interoperability is not a core constraint, then there won't be an incentive for an open standard.
That's important because in plenty of other software - databases, OSes, compilers and binary formats, networks, etc. name your favorite CS topic, there is an open standard for it.
You can either achieve interoperability by... achieving interoperability, or by dominating market share and edging the user's action space to solely stay in your ecosystem (change the action distribution of your user) that for all intents and purposes that it "interoperates with everything" means that, "since I bought entirely into this ecosystem, I interoperate with everything".
So ultimately I agree with you, but to present it as a failure of objective engineering prowess on open source is weird. As you said yourself, it's clearly the network effects that prop the business model. And sure, gaining market share isn't a trivial task, but it's not engineering.
I think framing it in the interoperability way is healthier - because it actually provides a potential new out to work towards, rather than this weird beration double-bind that frames Microsoft's approach as The Objective Way to do things. It's not and doesn't have to be.
Foreign government officials choosing Microsoft is not always the result of Microsoft been the best option. Sometimes, little bit of bribing helps.
"Microsoft is paying more than $25 million to settle federal corruption charges involving a bribery scheme in Hungary and other foreign offices."
https://apnews.com/article/f6852284a2154ac5ab422d51495c4056
Trump government now makes bribing more useful.
https://apnews.com/article/fcpa-bribery-trump-antibribery-la...
It violates elementary, ABC, read-it-in-Rousseau principles of legitimate state operation if government documents of any kind whatsoever are in a proprietary format. This is why EU courts forced .docx on Microsoft. .doc files were found to be simply invalid binary blobs with no meaning whatsoever in a democracy. I dimly remember a US court - maybe Minnesota? - tending to the same.
It was only the magical atmosphere in which Microsoft and ‘tech’ must succeed that made this flat out obvious conclusion invisible.
I remember beginning writing a pandoc writer the minute it happened but some bright young brain beat me to it.
The XML if I remember, had manifold curiosa probably meant to impede other implementations, but it was real.
My impression is that his complaints, which echo those of the doc period in detail, arise from users’ failure to adopt best practices.
> Proprietary file formats are an industry standard. It is the lowest resistance way to deliver features
Maybe, but I still disagree.
What "game-changing" features are missing from document file formats (such as word processing documents or spreadsheets)?
I'd prefer that format being an open standard with wide compatibility over those new features.
This is not true.
In my company I decided we would not depend on Microsoft products. We use kSuite that offers everything MS does, ~90% cheaper. The one real problem we run into is PowerPoint decks that look different or get corrupted when used across different Office suites, including ones that are focused on Microsoft compatibility like OnlyOffice.
Proprietary formats are a clear lock-in tool, because the cost of dealing with incompatibility is higher than the cost of paying the piper. (Although me being stubborn I made claude rewrite the OOXML to behave, but that's an absurd thing to need to do!)
If open formats were the standard and could be reliably exchanged, it would remove a big reason to ever use Office products.