> For what it's worth, docx is technically standard. Not sure how that pans out in practice.

It doesn’t, basically,—the spec isn’t enough to render it, and Microsoft has stopped engaging with ISO in favour of publishing what is now nineteen major versions[1] of their own spec in step with Office updates. There also was a huge shitstorm[2] around the ratification of the original, unsurprisingly given how useless and patent-infested it was.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...

[2] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007011720521698

It's an "international standard" via both ECMA and the ISO/IEC JTC1. Although ISO in particular seems very pleased that JTC1 exists, this is a terrible way to do technical work, basically the idea is that countries get to agree the world's standards using a democratic process.

But why would countries be the right entities to do this work? They aren't, but there are a conveniently small number of them internationally and there were already bodies to represent them. Specifically they send representatives from their own national standards bodies to the relevant JTC1 sub-sub-committees. Yes that means Taiwan isn't represented.

For situations where there's just a matter of agreeing a few narrow specifics, such as the A-series paper standards, it doesn't really matter how it's done. For a huge problem like "Standardize Word processor application data" it's completely impractical and the results are all you'd expect. Microsoft basically leaned on national representatives from smaller countries to push their pointless vanity standard through both ECMA and subsequently JTC1.

After all that, it's basically futile because of course Microsoft can't magically make their "Office" suite and particularly Word behave in a documented internationally standard way, they don't even know how to describe much of the behaviour except "You know, that's how Word does it". And so, the "Office Open XML" standard has long sections where there's a magic escape hatch for "legacy" documents, which Word uses extensively, and it will always do that.

"Standard" except that yeah, all this non-standard stuff is critical and will be used forever. Futile.

I am not sure about the first part. Most Libre Office users I have come across seem to be running it on Windows.

Of course MS Office is easily dominant on Windows.

> worth, [docx][1] is technically standard.

there was the funny thing thy MS published the standard and at the same time implemented a different standard then due to some stuff MS had to implement their standard properly and now you had 2 docx standards and had to "choose" which to use when setting up MS Word (like back in ~2007 or so) .... then they always switched to the standardized docx but they kinda continued to mess with it to a point where you shouldn't expect a MS Word document to be readable by anything even if it supposedly is saved in the standardized format (and when nitpicking it theoretically also is, just practically not in a very useful way).