[snewman]

Yeah, it's pretty hard. Microsoft's spec (for the OOXML formats) is over 6,000 pages long, and extremely hard to follow by all accounts. And no, that's not a 10-page specification followed by 5,990 pages of examples. The Office apps have incredibly complex functionality, and then factor in decades of revisions, upgrades, overlays, and general complexity creep.

Also bear in mind that while Google does have large (not infinite!) resources, they also have large responsibilities. Like anything, it comes down to economics: they could hire or repurpose 500 engineers to work on Office file formats, but it's not the optimal thing for them to do.

[enjo]

Keep in mind, Quickoffice (I was there) did that before the spec was released:)

[Create]

Sun did it back to improve StarOffice, though with only a few.