FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

Summary

columnists FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another Word up OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work. Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes. In that time, individuals and organizations alike have built up a planet-sized pile of documents, spreadsheets and other files that rely on Office to give them life. It's not that there is no escape. There's always a way, just the results can be ugly, expensive or inconsistent. Even today. It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it's worth.Which is odd because those jail doors have been open for nearly twenty years. OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a grueling and adversarial process. Microsoft pursued standardization because it has always been a standards-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options for its customers. Or because it had to at gunpoint, while vowing silently to follow the letter of the law but stymie its intent. You decide. If you're having any trouble reaching that decision, then The Document Foundation (TDF) can help. TDF, which spends its days worrying about such things, reports that Microsoft has effectively broken the standard by sticking with a transitional version as its default rather than the cleaner Strict variant. The result is that what Microsoft software renders is what Microsoft wants to render, despite nominal compliance. Even in 2026, if it's revenue versus users, Redmond's gonna Redmond (RGR). Once upon a time, though, RGR was defeated by the same forces of open standards that seem to have failed now....