[LINK] Google imposing file conversion

[Jim Birch]

Jan Whitaker wrote:

> I was alerted to this in a newsgroup this morning. What give Google
> the right to convert documents into a different format?
>

You might as well ask what give Microsoft the right to continue to impose
these old formats on unsuspecting users. :)

These labyrinthine old data formats don't have proper specification
documents, aren't even reliably interoperable between different Microsoft
product versions, and were actually designed with the (then, smart)
objective of facilitating reading as fast as possible from a floppy disk
into clunky old memory chips using a glacially slow processor without a
minute or two of initial processing before becoming editable.  This meant
that the data formats were pretty close to what appeared in memory.
Microsoft were accused of using an obfuscated format (which may have suited
them to some extent) but the format was really driven by the need to get a
document quickly into memory and operational on computers several orders of
magnitude slower than today's.

Supporting these clunky formats would have produced a lot of employment for
third parties and even for Microsoft.  They've been a constant supply of
problems at places I've worked.  Plus driven a lot of users nuts when
documents, especially large ones, randomly expire.  Microsoft doesn't want
you to use them. They should have been killed off like a couple of decades
ago.

>From Google point of view supporting these formats is a lose/lose
proposition.  Apart from the waste of resources trying to wrangle the
beasts, Google would cop flak even if they returned exactly the same file
as uploaded to their users as they are likely to fail if consumed in
different environments.

Jim