• marmarama@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Bit of a nitpick, but the comparison with the reversing of the MS Office formats is a bit tenuous, and somewhat revisionist.

    Competitors and open-source applications were reverse-engineering the Office file formats long before Apple iWork was a thing, and arguably no-one really gets it right because in order to get it perfect you’d have to reproduce the Office application layouting engine exactly, bug-for-bug. Even Microsoft doesn’t get it 100% from release to release.

    • Paradox@lemdro.id
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I remember using StarOffice 4 and being able to edit Word and Excel files with nary a problem, and that was in 1997. Apple’s best office product at the time was AppleWorks, which had a lot of trouble with office docs, if it opened them at all