The only flaw in your premise is that we are now just four months away from the 25th birthday of *Microsoft Office for Mac*. This predates the Windows version by more than a year. Also, Word was first made for Xenix (Microsoft's brand of Unix) under the name *Multi-Tool Word* (along with an MS-DOS version).

There has never been a time when Office was only available for Windows. And this latest move to iOS does not mean that "Windows is out of the loop". There is still (and always will be) the Windows desktop version of Office, and it does have more features than the mobile version.

And yet Microsoft were eventually vindicated, as every modern operating system is released with a bundled browser.

There was nothing inherently special about a web browser that meant that it always had to be an add-on item that had to be separately purchased. People expect that an OS will allow them to browse a web page or play a media file. They don't want to have to go buy Trumpet Winsock just to get a TCP/IP stack like they used to in the Windows 3.0 days. These are just the basic user requirements.

It only came with these editions of Office:

• Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007
• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007

It was not in these editions:

• Microsoft Office Basic 2007
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007
• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus

It is a bizarre selection of editions. You would think that higher Office editions would contain everything in the ones below it.

And the citation showing proof of this retcon is...

I certainly don't recall anyone from the EU saying at the time that they were just using Internet Explorer as an excuse for punishing Microsoft for other crimes.

Not according to this Ars comparison of OneNote on Windows and Mac, where they said that unlike the Windows version, the OS X version requires a Microsoft account. So it seems the Windows version can use local *.ONE files.

That is still more recent than the Microsoft product listed in the subject line (i.e. IE) that caused Microsoft so much grief for including it in Windows.

It has been around for over a decade now, and has been part of Microsoft Office since 2007. Microsoft Office is an (apparently) obscure suite of productivity software for Windows and Mac. Microsoft Windows is an graphic user interface operating system that has been around in various forms since the mid 80s.

The 80s was the decade when style took a holiday.

Some people's gaming rigs are slow - or at least slower than yours. The alternative to requiring that you use an HDD is to increase the minimum specs so that people with slower computers are prevented from being able to play the game at all.

Why should other people have to suffer because you decided to make the trade-off between speed and disk space?

Considering that both the pirated and legitimate versions of the game has to be downloaded, how would forcing it to be a large download prevent piracy? It would make things harder to distribute the pirated version on optical media, but who does that these days?

But the police don't actually make the laws, so they don't need to do the research. And besides, the police have had plenty of drugs in their possession over the years, and they have actively sent officers out to buy drugs to gather evidence against dealers.

Now I don't know whether this is a case of downloading a few pictures to test the filtering system (or to work out how easy it was to do), or whether this was a large stockpile that went beyond any notion of research. But frankly, if anyone could possibly use the old "research" excuse it would have to be someone that actually had a need to do research.

And I say that as someone totally opposed to any form of widespread internet filtering.

Did you miss the part in the they already had a license agreement, but that it ended because they Youtube didn't want to pay the price that GEMA was asking? From the article:

"In 2007 the entities reached a licensing agreement for YouTube to use works from GEMA's extensive repertoire. Two years later negotiations to extend that deal broke down when GEMA's long-term demand of around 0.12 Euro per stream was rejected by Google."

That doesn't sound like they were refusing to license its property; it just suggests that they wanted more money than Google was willing to spend.

I think that it has enough description that you could take a stab at it, but if you don't want to worry about exactly how much extra spacing to use then don't implement the feature. This is not a core feature of the spec; it is a very rare bit of backwards compatibility for software that dates back two decades. I guarantee that nobody who complains about this tag possesses a document containing this feature.

If not knowing exactly how much white space to implement is going to be a major problem for you, then no standard office specification will be suitable. Look hard enough at any spec and you will find parts where they miss giving exact measurements. And if you don't do that, then the complaint will be that the specification is too verbose that it is unworkable.

And once again, it is amazing how seamlessly people can move from the argument that "there is no explanation" to "that explanation isn't good enough". It is just moving the goalposts.

It is pretty uncalled for to claim zealotry when you are uncompromisingly demanding an absolute 100% accuracy with MS-Office documents before LibreOffice could be used.

There are plenty of businesses where pixel perfect accuracy is not required when sending documents outside the company. If people really need to read my documents with absolute accuracy, then I can PDF it. If I want to test a slideshow then I can use the Powerpoint viewer (it even works under Linux using Wine).

Even without changing the version of Word, a document's pagination can vary wildly depending on the printer driver being used. You don't even change your software for Word to go wrong.

Excel can be a problem if you use complex macros, but 99% of the ones that I see are just being used a glorified table editors with basic calculations. I constantly move between different computers, using Excel, Calc and even the shareware spreadsheet Spread32 (when I want to view something quickly) and it all works better than I had expected. The bigger problem that I have is when a package doesn't implement a feature that you are used to. For example, if I want to search for something spanning the sheets of a workbook I will always use Excel because LibreOffice disables the "Find All" button when you choose the option to span worksheets.

But even you there may end up being some problems, you should not dismiss the use of LibreOffice within any business environment just because you might have some formatting problem.

Welcome to the world of document specifications. None of them really describe what you need to implement. Remember when people criticised Microsoft's ODF support because they implemented what the spec said rather than what OpenOffice actually used? (Fortunately the spec has been updated since then)

In the case of this tag, it is only going to be found in 18 year old documents that have been converted into XML format. I bet the number of times that it because the subject of complaint here on /. is way more than the number of documents that actually contain the tag. And then if you find the subset of the times where a few pixels different padding is actually noticed in those documents... well, I bet it has never happened.

But all this is moot, as the original claim was that AutospaceLikeWord95 was not publicly documented, where as it clearly does have an explanation - even if there may be room for improvement.

Here, let me Google that for you.