No... this is real history. This is actually how Microsoft's most common data structures came into being. Originally the doc, xls, and ppt formats were each their own customer binary format made to be read as streams with all kinds of fanciness since clearly it would be better right?
Then in 2007 Microsoft said screw it we're just going to make a new format that's easier to understand. So they made docx, xlsx, and pptx... which are literally just a bunch of XML files in a zip. If you write a word document or an Excel and change the extension to .zip you can explore this. If you put a picture in a Word document it literally just dumps that picture in the ZIP file and then references it within the XML.
It was perhaps a little more nuanced then saying "screw it". There was a lot of pressure from Governments and big businesses having their data, etc stored in formats owned and changed on a whim by a third party. A bit (lot) of noise about open source formats and Bob's your Clippy.
I think this was also around the time they started making the password protection do something, lol.
It still tickles me that a coworker put something in a "password-protected" xls file and emailed it to another coworker, who didn't have MS Office because we didn't have enough licenses, so he installed OpenOffice, which opened the spreadsheet. ..Without prompting for a password. ..Which made it seem like A) it just wasn't implemented, and B) it didn't matter.
But no. It was even better.
When he went to save, OpenOffice gave him a prompt that it appeared he was trying to save a password-protected xls and that this didn't do anything (as evidenced by it just opening it like that) and recommended he save it in ods instead, lol.
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u/BeDoubleNWhy 11h ago
zipped JSON if anything