ARTICLE - Why the MS Office file formats is so complicated

[Ben Scott]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Michael ODonnell
<michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:
>  Quite the tangled mess and very hard to write compliant FOSS
>  apps against, but (at least on the surface) apparently not
>  the result of an actively evil intent.

  A-yup.  Lots of people (me included) have been saying that for
years.  It really comes down to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to
malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".  And
let's face it, Microsoft has plenty enough stupidity to go around.

  In many ways, Microsoft suffers from the result as much as others.
Can you imagine what having to work with the Windows or Office source
code must be like?  Code going back decades, much of it poorly
documented, coding practices evolving with time and marketing fads,
early stuff written by people who clearly had no clue about how to
design proper systems... it's a wonder it works at all.  (One could
argue it doesn't.)  One of the original goals in Vista was to replace
the legacy code still doing important stuff.  After struggling for two
years, they *gave up*.  Microsoft's can afford more resources that
just about any software development effort, and they still couldn't
figure it out.

  Of course, many people still put their critical data in that mess.
Now *that's* scary.  <gulp>

-- Ben