this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
167 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59285 readers
4443 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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