Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)
I remember Joel himself mentioning in some article about how Excel suddenly became dominant over a competitor (Lotus spreadsheets I think) because you could not only open Lotus files in Excel, but you could also save the Excel back into Lotus format (two way compatibility). I am supposing this is because Lotus file format was not complete crap.<p>If that is true, then isn&#x27;t it also very possible that MS had an incentive to keep building on top of its cruddy file format without rethinking the design at any point? Isn&#x27;t it true that even today, there is no viable competitor to MS Office even on non-Windows OS because MS has made file format compatibility extremely difficult?<p>I am very glad that the latest and greatest features of Office automation after (and including) Office 2007 were mostly still-born and we could stop worrying about this issue and use MS Office as a tool and not as a &quot;platform&quot;. It became too unwieldy even for hardcore MS supporters, and even though no good alternatives emerged, people generally decided that the programmability of MS Office had reached its limits - and moved away to other things like replacing them with browser based apps [1] I remember creating an Infopath &quot;app&quot; as a contractor around 2010, and wondering &quot;what is this crap? Have these people never seen browser based apps?&quot;<p>[1] This is probably a sweeping statement. I would love to hear from someone who is certain that Office automation was a superior technology for a particular use case.