> In my view, OOXML is indeed complex, convoluted, and obscure. But that’s likely less about a plot to block third-party compatibility and more about a self-interested negligence: Microsoft prioritized the convenience of its own implementation and neglected the qualities of clarity, simplicity, and universality that a general-purpose standard should have.

The author only provides arguments for "self-interested negligence". He provides no counterarguments to the claim that OOXML complexity was "a plot to block third-party compatibility". Therefore, he cannot compare "negligence" and "a plot". Therefore, his claim that "negligence" is a better explanation for OOXML complexity than "a plot" cannot follow.

To restate:

> If we dig into the context of OOXML’s creation, it can be argued that harming competitors was not Microsoft’s primary aim.

The author provides no evidence to support this claim. At most, the evidence provided in this section at most supports the claim that "negligence" played a role in OOXML complexity. From this evidence alone, no conclusions can be drawn about the "primariness" of "negligence" vs "harming competitors".

Unless we ever get the full archive of Microsoft emails, meeting minutes and recordings from all the secret microphones they didn't have in their meeting rooms, I don't think you can ever disprove this claim. It's generally impossible to conclusively disprove conspiracy theories, because you could always claim you're only showing there are no documents proving the conspiracy, but there are no documents disproving it.

The author is just implicitly appealing to Occam's razor here, as people often in face of accusations of a plot. They can show that Microsoft has backed the ANSI accreditation of ODF[1] and eventually implemented support for ODF import and export in Office, but that's not enough to prove there was no conspiracy.

Instead, the article just provides a very plausible explanation for the complexity in OOXML. Does this explanation thoroughly disprove the accusations of a plot? Clear not. Is it more plausible than a great plot to crush a bunch of competitors that had no market share and kill a better standard document format that Microsoft did end up implementing in Office? Yes. This is probably as far as we can get.

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/2007/05/16/microsoft-votes...

I mean sometimes you gotta ship a product (and remember back then, that meant masters for CDs,) and it's perfectly possible that whatever team was in charge of handling 'conversion' stuff for old format (remember that old excel formats have OLE type cruft going on, the sorts of things that led to VBA viruses, imagine what other functionality needs to be implemented) just plain had to take shortcuts in uglifying the spec to support all the jank.