Remember when Microsoft promised an open document standard for the next Office -- and it was many thousands of pages that was less than trivial to implement?

(Without looking, I assume that to add maiming to injury, the standard allowed variations, so non-Microsoft documents could be made incompatible between versions of Office?)

I haven't played the game, but the idiom these days seems to be "the cake is a lie".

Did you really expect the document standard to be 10 (or even 100) pages long and trivial to implement?

How long is the full spec for HTML, or PDF? Are either of those "trivial" to implement? Both of those formats are, IMNSHO, inherently simpler than the sum total of complexity of all the Office document formats. (Even if you just include Word and Excel)

Microsoft can't win here. Either they document the simple middle-of-the-road, 90% of Word docs conform, case, and get skewered for not being open enough. Or they release the full spec and get skewered for "Wow, writing a competitor to the most common word processing and spreadsheet application is actually harder than creating hotornot or million-dollar-homepage."

A competing standard, which didn't have to do dirty tricks to get ISO certified, was a fraction (tenth?) of the size.

Also, claims of innocence is extra absurd here:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Microsoft_offers_to_pay_blogger_...

The file formats for other competing formats (like say, .txt or .csv) are also very simple.

They also don't fully interoperate with Word or Excel.

You have a point, I guess it would be impossible to define a better format for use with the Office package. (Sadly, that wasn't a joke.)

I talked about compatibility in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691268

Last I heard Microsoft's format didn't even fully adhere to their own standard (although that may have been due to really bad standard authoring rather than anything intentional).