Maybe this is true when it comes to the Office formats in particular, I'm not familiar with them at all. But in general this is absolutely not true, or at least there are a lot of exceptions. The work of Dave Cutler's team, in particular, is an example of exceptional design, and do bear in mind that this is praise from someone who's been using and writing code for *nix systems for 15 years.
And don't get me started on Apple's "design first, program later". Most of the places where this still shows are inherited from NeXT. Their only serious attempt at an office format (that I'm aware of), in Pages, was pretty much a disaster.
Maybe this is true when it comes to the Office formats in particular, I'm not familiar with them at all. But in general this is absolutely not true, or at least there are a lot of exceptions. The work of Dave Cutler's team, in particular, is an example of exceptional design, and do bear in mind that this is praise from someone who's been using and writing code for *nix systems for 15 years.
And don't get me started on Apple's "design first, program later". Most of the places where this still shows are inherited from NeXT. Their only serious attempt at an office format (that I'm aware of), in Pages, was pretty much a disaster.