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Back then, Word was on the receiving end of what it's dishing out now. Then, WordPerfect had the monopoly marketshare, now Word has it.

Whoa, back up. You were the one who alleged that the Office formats "lock others out of the market". I just pointed out to you that the Office formats were invented when MS Office was running far behind WordPerfect. Your logic is upside down. And clearly, since OO is able to convert the Office formats (in your words, perform "excellent" conversion), it's not locking anybody out of any market. Nice try. Keep spinning.

Recently, IIRC.

Try 8 months ago. The RTF specs have been maintained since the early 1990s. Not exactly keeping things secret.

With all the inherent problems. Crappy clustering in Exchange, bad security in Outlook, etc.

And yet, despite all your alleged "inherent problems", Exchange out-sells and out-deploys all other email productivity server products.

You asked for "a single API that Microsoft was able to leverage that wasn't available to competitors" and I gave you a reference to 272 of them, plus 113 protocols.

Nice try. The context of the discussion was *Microsoft Office*. You were trying to paint the false picture that MS Office has benefited from undocumented APIs. None of the examples you cite illustrate that.

They programmed based on what MS promised, which was different from what MS delivered (while MS itself programmed to what was delivered).

Explain how Win95 isn't 32-bit. [And don't give me any crap about DOS apps or 16-bit apps being supported, either. That has nothing to do with the question of whether Win95 runs 32-bit applications].

Exactly, MS knew the problem was there and wrote around it before Windows was even released, while they put out the non-working programming guidelines for other developers to use and discover this on their own. They wrote the OS, they had a responsibility to tell others how to program for their OS. They used this secret to gain an unfair competitive advantage.

Nonsense. Discovering that you're out of memory isn't a secret. Nor are owner-draw windows. The WordPerfect devs simply sat on their hands waiting for MS to rescue them from issues that they could easily have worked around. I mean, for chrissakes, it's not very difficult to implement a cascading menu. Even the prodigious Windows-menu cloners writing KDE and Gnome figured that out without MS holding their hands.

I just pointed out to you that the Office formats were invented when MS Office was running far behind WordPerfect.

How different is the current format from 1992 Word?

Try 8 months ago.

Recently, but the suit was over early versions. Anyway, since RTF has some flaws (can't always represent an entire Word document), it's not an option as an interchange format.

RTF changed 8 months ago? Yep, recently as I said.

The context of the discussion was *Microsoft Office*. You were trying to paint the false picture that MS Office has benefited from undocumented APIs. None of the examples you cite illustrate that.

Read the suit.

The WordPerfect devs simply sat on their hands waiting for MS to rescue them from issues that they could easily have worked around.

Microsoft knew the limitation before release of Windows and told no one else of the limitation. They worked around the limitation before the release, and released a working Word around the time of Windows' release. They also refused to support developers asking about the problems even though they already had a solution to the problems with their operating system. These combined to get Word out before any other word processor.