It's what we the old farts have been saying during decades. Do not ever trust Microsoft, they are corrupt beyond hope, they're evil.

But people got blindsided by the new Microsoft propaganda.

Indeed. “The bad standard is the result of negligence rather than malice” is a total nonsequitur. It in no way excuses pushing a bad standard on everybody to say, “they didn’t mean to make it bad.” It was still bad in obvious ways, and they still did power moves and underhanded things to get it signed off over legitimate technical objections. The reasons it was bad are irrelevant to the fact that it was bad and they promoted it.

wow. thanks for sharing

What if they could do it, because people like you had quit?

Malicious compliance is still sabotage.

> The format wasn't the act of sabotage. The way they drove it through the standardization process was.

Why not both? You didn't provide any arguments against it.

The format itself is an act of sabotage. The format is basically Microsoft's internal formats for Office, with all their bugs and flags and features, for which Microsoft already owned the only working implementation that works correctly.

They completely rejected what standardisation processes _do_, which is to subject the format to scrutiny, criticism and change, to make it universally useful and implementable.

Microsoft absolutely did not do that. They rammed through their proprietary bullshit and slapped an "open standards!" label on it.

https://www.consortiuminfo.org/opendocument-and-ooxml/the-co...

> 2.15.3.26 footnoteLayoutLikeWW8 (Emulate Word 6.x/95/97 Footnote Placement)

> This element specifies that applications shall emulate the behavior of a previously existing word processing application (Microsoft Word 6.x/95/97) when determining the placement of the contents of footnotes relative to the page on which the footnote reference occurs. This emulation typically involves some and/or all of the footnote being inappropriately placed on the page following the footnote reference.

> [Guidance: To faithfully replicate this behavior, applications must imitate the behavior of that application, which involves many possible behaviors and cannot be faithfully placed into narrative for this Office Open XML Standard. If applications wish to match this behavior, they must utilize and duplicate the output of those applications. It is recommended that applications not intentionally replicate this behavior as it was deprecated due to issues with its output, and is maintained only for compatibility with existing documents from that application. end guidance]

> Typically, applications shall not perform this compatibility. This element, when present with a val attribute value of true (or equivalent), specifies that applications shall attempt to mimic that existing word processing application in this regard.

The format was _written_ to include specifics that only matter for one product - Microsoft Office - and don't even reveal in that format how those specifics should be interpreted faithfully. This is of ZERO use to anyone looking to make interoperable software that can make use of this standard. And that's the point - it's NOT an open standard, it's quite deliberately Microsoft's proprietary and closed bullshit with "open" shat on top of it, and a paid-for endorsement by a standards body that completely detonated its own credibility by approving it.

Not only small islands nations. For example in Finland Microsoft partners invaded the local working group to get the standard passed in the voting process.

That is not on MS though. That is a fault of those in change of ISO, that they assign same vote weight to the enormous empires and to the microstates. Votes should be proportional to the population, full stop. Then no one would be able to abuse the system by simply playing by the rules.

Sounds exactly like deliberate sabotage to me.

In other words: "the purpose of a system is what it does". Duck-typed ethics?

One difference it might make is a warning for those who aren't deliberately trying to make something complex, and think they might thus be immune from the result. In fact, you can wind up with something terribly complex as a result of other pressures, incentives, history, and context, without it having been deliberate. It takes active investment and skill to avoid complexity, even if not intended.

You are wrong. Microsoft was not asked to open the file format. There was an open file format already accepted as an ISO standard, so now they needed to make their product compliant with an ISO standard because companies around the world were going to prioritise that in their purchases. They did everything they could to ensure that their format was both an ISO standard, and impossible for somebody else to implement.

But they did define two variants to get their standard approved in the fast track process.

The Transitional variant which is entirely backwards compatible is not fully defined in a way that others can implement without reverse engineering how Microsoft Office does things.

The Strict variant isn't totally compatible with all older binary formats but is fully defined.

Guess which one is the standard file format?

> OOXML is complex because it has to be.

What it didn't have to be is sections upon sections of "this behaviour is as seen in Word 95", "this behaviour is as seen in Word 97" without any further specification or context.

The main struggle for independent implementors was reverse engineering all the implicit and explicit assumptions and inner workings of MS Office software.

> But admitting that would have been hard. Easier to come up with conspiracy theories.

I actually read through a lot of that spec at the time. A lot of it was just lip service to open standards at a time when MS was under a lot of regulatory pressure.

So you put extensions in the spec you don’t make it impossible for anyone else to implement. They knew open source suites were competing with them they did it on purpose.

The…sausage has a lot of moving parts?

Also this:

> Google stated that "the ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages" and that

    If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison.

    Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.[118]