• marmarama@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Paradox@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      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