Microsoft pressured ISO to approve their format but NEVER implemented it according to the specification. In the meantime, many governments adopted MSO with the promise that compatibility would evetually be the norm. It never happened.

I don't know if an anti-trust lawsuit is adequate, but governments should ban adoption of proprietary formats entirely.

More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open....

Microsoft produced the boondoggle 'Office Open XML' formwat in reaction to the moves made by several large organisations to standardise on the Open Document format as used by OpenOffice et al. Microsoft reacted like they often did: they created their own 'open' format, deceptively named 'Office Open XML' to make it easy to confuse with the OpenOffice XML-based format and submitted it to standardisation bodies in the hope that one would bite. ISO - which already standardised the Open Document format - did, giving Microsoft a weapon to wield in any bidding war on which file format should be adopted as a standard.

I called OOXML a boondoggle because that what it was. Microsoft's documentation of the format consisted of a several thousand pages long semi-binary dump of the files produced by Microsoft Office - which are not much more than memory dumps containing binary blobs, poured into an XML container with vague descriptions of what the data types actually were - often no more than 'as produced by Microsoft Office version x.y'. A large portion of the original OOXML files consisted of blobs of binary MS Office data, making it close to impossible to implement that version by non-Microsoft entities. When pressured Microsoft agreed that the current versions of Microsoft Office were not producing 'standard-compliant' OOXML but that this would change in newer versions. Well, the future came, the OOXML format was cleaned up and documented so as to be interoperable but Microsoft never adapted Microsoft Office to the standard, instead producing its own iteration of 'the standard'.

In short, the only reason why they every produced OOXML - the 'standard' - was to use it as a club to wield in negotiations. They never meant for it to be an actual data interchange standard, they never aimed at having third parties stand on a like footing with regard to which version of OOXML was meant to be canonical. It was, and still is, meant to be a box to tick on a compliance list for getting large contracts, not a file format standard to which their products would be tailored. Their vision is whatever is produced by the latest incarnation of Microsoft Office is 'the standard', just like before.

The real question to be answered here is why ISO went along with this charade when they already had a working file format standard in the Open Document format. They could just have said 'no' like other standards bodies did, Microsoft could have been made to implement the ODF format and the world would be a better, more interoperable place.

So indeed, Microsoft should not be allowed to use a file format of their own design when implementing their own software while selling it as if it abides by an ISO standard.

Yes, if they use it unfairly against the competitors while being a monopoly.

How would they do that?

By using proprietary file formats rather than open standards, which forces users who share data into adopting the same software.

So your position is that any use of their own format is abusive in itself? The anticompetitive part of Microsoft Word is the bare fact that it exists? Under what circumstances would it be legal to use your own file format?

The anticompetitive part is that MS Word has >90% (?) market and forces its users into proprietary formats. Now, anyone who wants to use an alternative software will likely have to interact with the users of MS Word and will have to buy and install MS Word.

If that were true, MS Word would never have gotten off the ground in the first place.

I don't see any connection here.

Word was not the first word processor. Everything you're angry at Word about now was also true of the popular word processors that preceded it.

I agree with you that MSFT using their own file format is not abusive, but it's also true that Word has traditionally (say, last 20 years) had a MUCH MUCH larger market share than anything that came before.

Its closest real competitor was WordPerfect, but by the time the world shifted to Windows versions of thing (ie, not DOS versions), WP's goose was cooked and the only real player in offices was Word.

It's not that way now because of inroads made by online tools / web-native things that make traditional document production less important than it used to be, but they're still the 400 pound gorilla. They're just not really a monopolistic gorilla.

At that time, word processors were not as widespread and user-friendly. Word was more user-friendly than alternatives, I think, and attracted many new users.

Or maybe it was just a luck for MS, who knows...

Wordperfect 6.0 and 6.1 crashed frequently. When the auto save every 10 minutes feature showed up I started losing much less work! So just not crashing was a low hurdle for ms office to clear