I remember when the whole open document format ISO standards board stuff was going on, and how underhanded Microsoft were about it. Par for the course for an utterly immoral pit of brown-bagging vipers.
There’s a number of walkthroughs of what happened, and what Microsoft did to make it as hard as possible for a real open document format to be put into place, to the point where they still can’t even follow their own obscure standards. Between vote-rigging and flooding the document committee with a 7000 page “standards schema” - this still annoys the hell out of me.
The writer’s views are the perfect echo chamber for my own. But it’s the kind of echo chamber that, if presented plainly to a layman, they would agree with it completely.
Used to work as a vendor at MS in Windows Server. Before that, as “coopetition” in a highly-specific technical workspace. They always behaved as if they were gods and everyone else peons. They also followed the 4E format: Embrace, Extend, Exploit, Exterminate. Saw firsthand how many times they kicked big-ticket customers in the nuts.
OOXML raised its head a few times in our work, but MS just didn’t care. Why invest in something you were going to steamroll anyway?