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A comment on Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone regarding Mono.. Parent comment

Re:Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone r... by sokoloff on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @07:36AM (#691291)
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."

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Re:Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone r... by berntb on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @07:43AM (#691294)
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_...

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Re:Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone r... by sokoloff on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @10:12AM (#691477)
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.

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Re:Miguel De Icaza: Microsoft promises to never sue anyone r... by berntb on Tuesday July 07, 2009 @11:15AM (#691604)
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

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