Re: It's free....
> Sure, Office formats were not designed for interoperability. Nor Photoshop PSD, Autodesk DWG, or many other application formats nobody complains about...
Actually DWG was complained about for many years. Autodesk also had AutoCAD DXF which _was_ designed for interoperability:
"""AutoCAD DXF (Drawing Interchange Format, or Drawing Exchange Format) is a CAD data file format developed by Autodesk[1] for enabling data interoperability between AutoCAD and other programs."""
> even PDF was not an open standard until 2008 - and not fully. Yet nobody complained about PDF.
Actually PDF _was_ designed for interoperability. It is _Portable_ Document Format and the specification was freely available since 1993.
> Most cameras outputs their own RAW formats,
RAW is a direct dump of the sensor data, of course they are all different, even between models of one brand. But almost all cameras will also produce standard JPEGs, or only JPEGs, or both.
> But now Office formats are fully documented, XML based, and documentation is no scanty at all.
It is certainly not 'scanty'. Bloated is what it is. Several thousand pages because is contains a mishmash of 30 years of ad-hoc development. For example there are three specifications within that of 'tables' because MS Office implements them in 3 different ways.
While the OOXML spec has been around for a while there were many years when MS did not implement it so other programs had to implement the standard _and_ 'what MS does', adding to the complexity.
> Also standard are good, but they also imply a usually slow approval process and risk "design-by-commitee" issues.
While MS Office has followed a completely different path over the years of ad-hoc changes.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
