LibreOffice slams Microsoft for locking in Office users w/ complex file formats

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Lock-in: formats vs people and organizations

  • One view: Microsoft doesn’t “lock in” users; organizations do, by standardizing on Office formats and tools because of convenience and network effects.
  • Others counter that this is exactly what “lock-in” is: schools and workplaces send files only reliably readable with Microsoft Office, forcing recipients onto Windows/Office or VMs.
  • Some argue that today the real lock-in is the wider ecosystem (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, collaboration features), not just the file formats.

Microsoft strategy and intent

  • Several comments see OOXML and similar moves as a continuation of a long-term strategy: proprietary tech, embrace–extend–extinguish, buying and killing competitors, sabotaging open standards.
  • Others say this is over-ascribing malice: Office’s formats are a byproduct of decades of features, backward-compatibility hacks, and internal chaos. Even Microsoft engineers reportedly hate dealing with it.

OOXML complexity and interoperability

  • People who’ve worked with OOXML describe it as essentially a serialization of Office’s internals, including quirky flags like “behave like Word 95/WordPerfect,” making full reimplementation very hard.
  • The standard is seen as cryptic, inconsistently documented, and entangled with legacy behavior, forcing reverse engineering of old Word versions.
  • Some report that even different Word versions can’t always open each other’s docs correctly; LibreOffice sometimes handles certain old files better than modern Word.

Comparison to PDF and other formats

  • PDF is generally viewed as far more interoperable: many tools can read/generate it, the spec is relatively clean for rendering, though editing is painful and many real-world PDFs are non-conforming.
  • Alternatives suggested: Markdown + pandoc, Asciidoc, HTML, CSV; critics reply these are too primitive or require substantial tooling and expertise to match Office’s capabilities.

LibreOffice vs Office vs Google Docs

  • LibreOffice is praised for doing a surprisingly good job with Office formats, but PowerPoint compatibility and polish are recurring pain points.
  • A major criticism: lack of a first-class, Google-Docs-style web collaboration experience. Collabora/online solutions exist but are described as clunky and resource-heavy.
  • Many organizations now standardize on either Office 365 or Google Workspace, with PDF for interchange; in that world, some argue strict file-format openness “matters less” than collaboration.

Relevance and framing of the complaint

  • Some see LibreOffice’s blog post as rehashing a 20-year-old fight about OOXML; others argue it’s still relevant because those decisions continue to hinder user freedom and FOSS adoption.
  • A side thread criticizes sensationalist headlines using words like “slams” as clickbait that add heat but little light.