instead, they're now flailing around with the ole' triple-E gauntlet (Embrace/Extend/Extinguish), and this time. it seemed like they were going to take the smart route and at least FEIGN an interest in open standards/open formats (kind of like Vista feigns having *nix-type security).

OS X, Linux (Ubuntu especially), Google, Firefox (and now ODF) have made a significant, measurable impact these last few years. subtlety or something.įor now, they may still be king but Microsoft's market share isn't the impenetrable fortress it was in the late 90s/early 00s. I just assumed that, since Office is their second most important product and OOXML is obviously a carefully constructed weapon to counter the looming threat of ODF and OSS in general, they'd have enough sense to act with some sense of. How long until someone in a marketing department in Redmond decides it would be a brilliant idea to remove support in current DOC/PPT/XLS format in order to force people to move to OOXML formats ? Today, they just removed support for archaeologically-old formats. Which in itself is one additional argument showing why trusting Microsoft formats is bad. Documentation of the containers, and the various compression algorithme that where available back then up to Shrink/Expand (The modern Deflate/Inflate weren't introduced yet back then).Īnyone wishing could back then re-implement ZIP support into his/her own code. I still have some floppy laying around with early version of the software which included a complete documentation of the format.

ZIP has not been reverse engineered, for the simple reason that from day 1 it ZIP has been an open format.

2) ZIP (tm) is widely used by countless libs and apps, and decompression has been reverse engineered, open sourced, dissected, inspected, and neglected (Apologies to Arlo Guthry) to death.

Microsoft office 2003 service pack 3