[stg22]

Depending on the political situation in your country, your parents probably got the same knowledge of American life from TV series and films. America's monopoly of popular culture is weaker today than it was when they were growing up.

[aj7]

Not. It’s stronger than it ever was. That’s what speeding up communication did. For now, anyway.

[AtlasBarfed]

Speaking of monopolies, the article is "celebrating" 40 years of brazen anticompetitive behavior and monopoly that inflicting billions and possibly trillions of dollars of economic damage on the world.

And of course a long slide from any sort of meaningful enforcement on monopolies and cartels, once in the American market, and now largely in the international sphere.

Finally, Microsoft Office itself is an information prison. The information is locked in proprietary and defensively changed file formats that either require more Microsoft "products" to access the information meaningfully, or decades of reverse engineering.

And keep in mind that 90% of the data in office documents is just ... text.

Anyway, Happy Microsoft Word day apparently.

[feedsmgmt]

LibreOffice seems to work just fine for reading and writing doc and docx and it is completely free and open source.

[aj7]

Yes.