[victorp13]

> Last thing I'll say is, you know your API is good when "S3 compatable API" is a selling point of your competitors.

Counter-point: You know that you're the dominant player. See: .psd, .pdf, .xslx. Not particularly good file types, yet widely supported by competitor products.

[pavlov]

Photoshop, PDF and Excel are all products that were truly much better than their competitors at the time of their introduction.

Every file format accumulates cruft over thirty years, especially when you have hundreds of millions of users and you have to expand the product for use cases the original developers never imagined. But that doesn’t mean the success wasn’t justified.

[jalk]

PDF is not a product. I get what you are day but I can’t say that I’ve ever liked Adobe Acrobat

[pavlov]

PDF is a product, just like PostScript was.

[eternityforest]

Most people use libraries to read and write the files, and judge them pretty much entirely by popularity.

A very popular file format pretty much defines the semantics and feature set for that category in everyone's mind, and if you build around those features, then you can probably expect good compatibility.

Nobody thinks about the actual on disk data layout, they think about standardization and semantics.

I rather like PDF, although it doesn't seem to be well suited for 500MB scans of old books and the like, they really seem to bog down on older mobile devices.