Similar story for the office suite. Microsoft keeps a lion share of the desktop market trapped using their office software by using anti-competitive practices like switching to new formats like docx, xslx, etc. once other office software successfully reverse-engineered the formats like .doc because they know if they lose the office software market they’ll slowly lose the desktop OS market.
ODF (the format used by OpenOffice and later LibreOffice, as well as other open source applications) was standardized first. Instead of using, and/or improving an existing standard they created a new one, which as I understand it is much longer and more complicated. Thus harder for competitors to implement.
Microsoft's XML office formats were in the 2003 release of Office, which predates ODF's submission to a standards body by a couple of years. A few months later Microsoft's formats were also submitted for standardization.
There were a few reasons the OOXML spec was quite a bit longer than the ODF spec. The main were:
1. ODF has a cleaner and less verbose markup.
2. ODF was very underspecified. For example, the spreadsheet spec didn't say much about formulas beyond that they should exist. The OOXML spec, on the other hand, had hundreds of pages defining spreadsheet formulas and the functions available.
One problem with ODF was that Sun wanted ODF to have just what it needed to support StarOffice and nothing more. There were proposals to make ODF better able to represent documents from other systems such as existing Office, Word Perfect, and Lotus, but Sun had sufficient influence to stop that.
HTML, CSS, and JS are also standardized but IE & Edge go in their own direction whenever it suits them. Show me office software that has perfect compatibility with Microsoft’s office software and I’ll retract everything I’ve said.
Given the market share of how many (cross platform, cross architecture) exploits can be delivered through pdf payload... I would say yes, Imho I totally have the same complaints about pdf.
>because they know if they lose the office software market they’ll slowly lose the desktop OS market
Why? You think that people will enjoy having subpar desktop experience by using Linux? Or they all afford to pay 2x or 3x for Apple products compared to a regular PC?
Not to mention that there are vast quantities of Windows-only, often custom, business software that keeps the world running. The only way Microsoft is losing the desktop is if they throw it away, which to be fair does appear to be what they're doing.
