[zdw]

This is the real reason. Put your data in the MS format roach motel, and it's a challenge to ever get it out with full fidelity.

The mid-oughts battle over this in the international standardizations space is pretty fraught: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

And even now, even though there is a "standard" and schemas for, MS's apps mostly ignore them, or use undocumented extensions (as far as I'm aware), so it the whole thing was truly straight from MS's embrace/extend/extinguish playbook.

[tiahura]

"get it out with full fidelity"

Primarily because there isn't a fully-functional equivalent.

[zdw]

It's almost like it was intentionally designed that way...

[tiahura]

Like being able to use the same category for email and events?