Jure RepincLet the Platforms Burn
marmaramaBit of a nitpick, but the comparison with the reversing of the MS Office formats is a bit tenuous, and somewhat revisionist.
Competitors and open-source applications were reverse-engineering the Office file formats long before Apple iWork was a thing, and arguably no-one really gets it right because in order to get it perfect you’d have to reproduce the Office application layouting engine exactly, bug-for-bug. Even Microsoft doesn’t get it 100% from release to release.
ParadoxI remember using StarOffice 4 and being able to edit Word and Excel files with nary a problem, and that was in 1997. Apple’s best office product at the time was AppleWorks, which had a lot of trouble with office docs, if it opened them at all