FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work. 

Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes. In that time, individuals and organizations alike have built up a planet-sized pile of documents, spreadsheets and other files that rely on Office to give them life. It's not that there is no escape. There's always a way, just the results can be ugly, expensive or inconsistent. Even today. It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it's worth.

Which is odd because those jail doors have been open for nearly twenty years. OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a grueling and adversarial process. Microsoft pursued standardization because it has always been a standards-led organization dedicated to maximizing the options for its customers. Or because it had to at gunpoint, while vowing silently to follow the letter of the law but stymie its intent. You decide.

If you're having any trouble reaching that decision, then The Document Foundation (TDF) can help. TDF, which spends its days worrying about such things, reports that Microsoft has effectively broken the standard by sticking with a transitional version as its default rather than the cleaner Strict variant. The result is that what Microsoft software renders is what Microsoft wants to render, despite nominal compliance. Even in 2026, if it's revenue versus users, Redmond's gonna Redmond (RGR).

Once upon a time, though, RGR was defeated by the same forces of open standards that seem to have failed now. In 1995, with his global control seemingly unbreakable, Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates sent out an all-hands memo. Known as the Internet Tidal Wave memo, this document predicted that the new open internet was going to sweep everything away and that the organization had to make owning this the number-one priority. 

This memo was remarkably prescient and timely. That year, the Internet was in its early stages of exponential growth and Windows 95 had started turning in remarkable numbers of its own, but there were probably between five and ten times as many MS users as there were people on the Net. Gates had every reason to think the Internet would fall to him as readily as Novell's NetWare was succumbing to Windows NT Server. By bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft could freeze out other early browsers. By aggressively pushing Windows-only content and services that only Internet Explorer could consume, the online experience could be kept nicely controlled. If you wanted an online audience, you had to go to Microsoft. 

This didn't work. Open source did. The internet had been born open and its protocols evolved rapidly without the weight of corporate motivation around their ankles. Open source servers and networking worked better and could be deployed at scale without the need to generate revenue. Open source rendering engines and frameworks freed the browser market to out-innovate the lock-in machine of Internet Explorer. This is a hugely simplistic gloss of a pivotal period in global technopolitics and shenanigans, but the outcome is that MS lost ground and influence, culminating in the company transitioning IE successor browser Edge to open source Chromium/Blink in 2020.

So, with the right open source components, say an OOXML engine, and sufficient industry support, the data in jail in Office can be liberated. If only someone had produced such an engine. And they have. Dozens of them, all over the place, in all sorts of languages and all sorts of packaging. Every FOSS office productivity suite has one, there are SDKs, and there is active development in the new hotness of Rust and other languages. The standard is alive and well and living, not just in office products but in browser plug-ins and stand-alone apps and wherever it seems like a good idea.

There is nothing wrong with this diversity, except that it's not doing the one thing it needs to do the most, breaking Microsoft's monopoly in the enterprise. None of the implementations render Microsoft-generated documents reliably or can serve as part of a dependable mixed-platform workflow. In the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft has the control over data that it tried so hard to force on the open Internet. Imagine where digital sovereignty would be if that had worked. 

What's needed is neither yet another OOXML engine nor an attempt to rally behind one or two as the basis of an Office equivalent to WebKit or Blink. All anyone wants is for their documents to render properly, no matter where they are created or where they are consumed. Publish a Microsoft Word document to the Web and know it'll appear faithfully in every browser? Yes please. Get a big fat editing job from a client and get to use the tools that work best for you? Oh, if only. 

For that to happen, there certainly has to be an open, freely usable standard – just not a document format standard. We have that. What we need is a test suite that can take any OOXML engine and test its compliance against what Microsoft is actually doing. That means the tooling wrapped around the spec has to account for proprietary dependencies that get smuggled in, such as fonts. It also means actively and continuously tracking the ground truth of Microsoft's evolving products and services.

It doesn't need to be perfect, but it absolutely needs to be good enough. Compliant engines have to become good enough for a critical mass of users to coalesce around them.

FOSS overcame Microsoft's massive structural advantages when the modern Internet was born, and it can do the same again.

It's far harder this time: the defenses are formidable, but the analytics, testing, and rapid evolvability of FOSS these days are equally formidable. You're all clear, kid. Let's blow this thing and go home. ®