> They didn't have the luxury to first come up with a clean file format and then write the tools around it.
This is just not right.
They where not required (AFIK) and in some edge cases also didn't provide a perfect conversion of all old documents to the open format. Actually even just converting between different versions of their proprietary formats had a tendency to break things sometimes! (back then)
> unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
(EDIT: actually 2006, so uh, maybe XML hype)
we speak about ~2010, the hype was pretty dead again at that time, and the main reason they choose it is to position it as "completion" to emerging standardized open office document formats which all used XML as markup language (except they don't really use XML as mark down language but more like serialization to JSON but way more complex, but that doesn't matter they mostly need to convince not supper tech affine people about them "no longer trying to hamper competition" to preclude legislative action and governments from switching to other office suites due to the closed format making them worry).
so they where more then able to
- do a clean design, if anyway a lot of old "proprietary" documents break subtly when converting it doesn't matter (and they did break)
This is just not right.
They where not required (AFIK) and in some edge cases also didn't provide a perfect conversion of all old documents to the open format. Actually even just converting between different versions of their proprietary formats had a tendency to break things sometimes! (back then)
> unbelievable XML hype that existed for a short time in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
(EDIT: actually 2006, so uh, maybe XML hype) we speak about ~2010, the hype was pretty dead again at that time, and the main reason they choose it is to position it as "completion" to emerging standardized open office document formats which all used XML as markup language (except they don't really use XML as mark down language but more like serialization to JSON but way more complex, but that doesn't matter they mostly need to convince not supper tech affine people about them "no longer trying to hamper competition" to preclude legislative action and governments from switching to other office suites due to the closed format making them worry).
so they where more then able to
- do a clean design, if anyway a lot of old "proprietary" documents break subtly when converting it doesn't matter (and they did break)
- just adopt OpenDocument format