In the previous article, we explored the importance of standards: how the unspoken agreements governing electrical sockets, paper sizes and file formats form the foundations of a world in which choices remain open and power is not concentrated in the hands of a single player. We concluded with a question: if open standards are so beneficial, why aren’t they universally adopted?
The answer, in the case of document formats, lies in a single page produced by Microsoft Office. Getting rid of it is harder than it seems.
A file is never just a file
When you save a document on your computer, you are choosing a format — that is, the language in which your document is written in a way that the computer can understand: the set of rules that determines how words, tables, images and formatting instructions are stored and, consequently, how they can be retrieved, shared and read in the future.
For decades, the dominant format for office documents has been that produced by Microsoft Office. Initially as binary files with extensions such as DOC and XLS, then as XML-based formats introduced with Office 2007: DOCX, XLSX and PPTX. These formats are used by hundreds of millions of people. They are the lingua franca of offices, schools, public administrations and courts around the world.
Furthermore, in significant and decisive ways, they are proprietary — meaning they belong to Microsoft, are controlled by Microsoft and serve Microsoft’s interests in ways that may not align with the interests of users.
Understanding how all this works — and why it matters far beyond mere matters of software preference — is the aim of this article.
The architecture of dependency
Proprietary formats create dependency through a mechanism that is simple in principle and extraordinarily effective in practice: they make the data contained in a document inseparable from the software used to create it.
This is not a law of physics, but a design choice.
An open format — a format whose specifications are published, freely available and implementable by any software without restrictions — stores information in such a way that any compliant application can read, write and reproduce it faithfully.
A proprietary format, by contrast, may contain undocumented features, private extensions or behaviours that only the original software implements correctly. The document may be opened by other applications, but it cannot always be reproduced faithfully.
The practical consequence is familiar to anyone who has tried to open a Microsoft Office document in another application: the formatting becomes distorted, bullet points shift, tables lose their proportions, and headings appear different.
A presentation that looked polished in PowerPoint seems slapdash in a different viewer: the content is all there, whilst the document, strictly speaking, is not.
This is “lock-in”: it is not a padlock, it is not a technical ban, it is not a contractual restriction, but a silent and persistent friction that makes any work outside the Microsoft ecosystem seem slightly off, slightly unreliable, slightly unprofessional — and ensures that the easiest route is to return …
