If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
In many ways, recent LLM stuff is just the same process as how Excel took over the world.
You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.
>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
yet another proprietary format?
And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.