yeah, wine's trajectory is the complete opposite of MS.

I reject the idea that MS is the expert in MS stuff. corporate structure and institutional knowledge and strategy are not the same as a person knowing something. I'm sure there are people in MS who know more than anyone. but together I suspect they're far far less than the sum of their parts.

I remember trying to open word-97 .doc files in office 2002.

Surely MS knows how to read it's own file format? Nope, well, not as well as star/sun/open/libreoffice (whichever one it was at the time).

I'm sure someone in MS was saying "lets do a bit more work on backwards compatibility"; I'm pretty sure that person was immediately tied to the desk with a giant annoying ribbon and forced to become familiar with a whole box of paperclip suppositories.

Oh hang on, that was decades ago, they've grown so much since then .