Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)
I was running a team of developers who reverse-engineered Office and other popular file formats to recover data from damaged files (that was in the 3.5&#x27;&#x27; diskette era and hard drives were prone to bad sector failures back then too, so there was a sizeable market for that). And yes, file formats were really complicated, which helped our business: there was a really high entry barrier. I remember MS Exchange Server took two man-years to crack.