ARTICLE - Why the MS Office file formats is so complicated

[Tom Buskey]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 1:18 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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


IIRC Microsoft used some of the Samba docs to document the early LAN Manager
stuff internally.

The Linux kernel can (mostly) throw out old binary interfaces/APIs/etc.
They have the source and can (mostly) regenerate the drivers, etc for the
newer stuff (mostly).  Windows doesn't have that luxury so there's lots of
cruft to support the old ways.  And there's lots more written on top of
Windows that has used that old cruft because it wasn't documented, etc.
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