What is the motivation for Joel Spolsky's post? Sympathy for MS Office file formats? Reads like a manifesto for never ever changing/cleaning up the file formats because it took a thousand man-years to come up with the current incarnation. He is even going so far as to defend the office file formats' complexity and resulting maintainability hell by saying that portability was not an issue fifteen+ years ago - well, it is now. His suggestions for file format conversion solutions are OK, but doesn't it occur to him, that developers don't want to be locked-in to having to shell out money for MS APIs forever? Ties in well with Bruce Schneier's latest post on vendor lock-in http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/lockin.html