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A comment on LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability. Parent comment

Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by fsflover on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:30AM (#28234274)
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.
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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by thaumasiotes on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:46AM (#28234483)
If that were true, MS Word would never have gotten off the ground in the first place.
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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by fsflover on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:53AM (#28234590)
I don't see any connection here.
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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by thaumasiotes on Thursday August 19, 2021 @10:56AM (#28234634)
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.
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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by ubermonkey on Thursday August 19, 2021 @06:20PM (#28240083)
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.

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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by fsflover on Thursday August 19, 2021 @11:04AM (#28234748)
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...

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Re:LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability by liketochill on Thursday August 19, 2021 @01:10PM (#28236469)
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
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