Microsoft doesn't lock in people.

People lock in people.

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.

Isn't it the same for PDF format spec?

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.

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...

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?

Why does the title say "slams" but neither the headline or URL contain "slams"? I think anything that says slams is not worth reading.

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 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.

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

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.

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.