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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

I feel qualified to opine on this as both a former power user of Word and someone building a word processor for lawyers from scratch[1]. I've spent hours pouring over both the .doc and OOXML specs and implementing them. There's a pretty obvious journey visible in those specs from 1984 when computers were under powered with RAM rounding to zero through the 00's when XML was the hot idea to today when MSFT wants everyone on the cloud for life.

Unlike say an IDE or generic text editor where developers are excited to work on and dogfood the product via self-hosting, word processors are kind of boring and require separate testing/QA.

MSFT has the deep pockets to fund that development and testing/QA. LibreOffice doesn't.

The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

[1] Plug: https://tritium.legal

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There is an old post by Joel Spolsky that worked as PM in Excel a looong time ago, and he agree with you: "Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros... (HN discussions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12471604 (393 points | Sept 2016 | 229 comments) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118909 (60 points | Feb 2008 | 20 comments))

One sentence that stood out to me from there was this:

> The bottom line is that there are thousands of developer years of work that went into the current versions of Word and Excel, and if you really want to clone those applications completely, you’re going to have to do thousands of years of work.

This is blatantly not true. Only a small portion of all those "thousands of developer-years" is going to be actively present in these products at whatever point in time, as a lot of those developer-years are spent on replacing the output of other developer-years.

It's the difference between 117 billion humans ever having lived, and 8 billion humans currently living (and just some number of millions at any point in time before the industrial revolution - we've been around for a while, supposedly).

And this is still ignoring that someone looking to reimplement Office would be racing towards something pre-existing, rather than trying to come up with it in the first place. A lot of those developer-hours were spent on design and research, rather than rote implementation.

I half agree. The grow of the final version is not linear, but I guess it's still like sqrt(time) or something. There is a lot of refactoring and backend changes, but also there are a lot of obscure "features" that accumuate.

(It would be nice to make a study about the number of LOCs in Chrome or other big open source project. LOC is not a perfect metric, but it's better than just guesing.)

Word has a compatibility configuration window with a lot of weird features, like (totally made up) add 3 pixels if a bullet list starts a new page because it was the default in WinWord 1.7. And there are like 10 of to mimic 10 versions and perhaps even other editors.

Also, a log time ago Word has a "feature" that converted automatically every acronym into a "Mini Card" or "Smart Card" or something with a dotted underline and a rectangle that appeared when you put the mouse over it. It was annoying. There is still code to show them, and perhaps even code to create them.

Microsoft may have the deep pockets, but there are Word documents that LibreOffice opens correctly, MS Word 2007 opens correctly, and MS Word 2024 doesn't.

> The business model is just screaming that GPL'd LibreOffice is toast.

Only if Word formats remain dominant. There might be hope with the EU moving off Word that an alternative, real standard might take root.

The document formats are largely irrelevant. The problem is the editor itself, and its enormous complexity.

How is the complexity relevant? LibreOffice already provides 99% of needed tools for most users, except a possibility to reliably read proprietary Word formats.

As AI tools become more dominant, businesses are going to want their documents to be fully read by their AI in whatever format they are in. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fight over all of this brewing in the next couple of years.

*poring over

Lawyers also tend to pore a lot, so it's worth getting the word right! ;-)

TIL

There are non-native English speaking lawyers in the world afaik

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