Microsoft Word ist keine Textverarbeitung mehr, sondern ein zusammengestückelter Wahnsinn von Subsystemen mit einem nicht mehr nachvollziehbaren Dateiformat.
Microsoft deployed their embrace-and-extend tactic to force users to upgrade, locking them into Word, by changing the file format the program used on a regular basis. Early versions of Word interoperated well with rivals such as Word Perfect, importing and exporting other programs‘ file formats. But as Word’s domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly — with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. […] The .doc file format was also obfuscated, deliberately or intentionally: rather than a parseable document containing formatting and macro metadata, it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures used by word, with pointers to the subroutines that provided formatting or macro support. […] This isn’t a data file format: it’s a nightmare! In the 21st century they tried to improve the picture by replacing it with an XML schema … but somehow managed to make things worse, by using XML tags that referred to callbacks in the Word codebase, rather than representing actual document semantics.
Ugh.