Article URL: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/07/17/microsofts-main-tool-for-lock-in/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48974476 Points: 123 # Comment…

In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open standards are so beneficial, why aren’t they universally adopted? The answer, in the case of document formats, lies in a single page produced by Microsoft Office. Getting rid of it is harder than it seems. When you save a document on your computer, you are choosing a format — that is, the language in which your document is written in a way that the computer can understand: the set of rules that determines how words, tables, images and formatting instructions are stored and, consequently, how they can be retrieved, shared and read in the future. For decades, the dominant format for office documents has been that produced by Microsoft Office. Initially as binary files with extensions such as DOC and XLS, then as XML-based formats introduced with Office 2007: DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. These formats are used by hundreds of millions of people. They are the lingua franca of offices, schools, public administrations and courts around the world. Furthermore, in significant and decisive ways, they are proprietary — meaning they belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft’s interests in ways that may not align with the interests of users. Understanding how all this works — and why it matters far beyond mere matters of software preference — is the aim of this article. Proprietary formats create dependency through a mechanism that is simple in principle and extraordinarily effective in practice: they make the data contained in a document inseparable from the software used to create it. An open format — a format whose specifications are published, freely available and implementable by any software without restrictions — stores information in such a way that any compliant application can read, write and reproduce it faithfully.