Ask HN: Will Microsoft sue vibe coded wordcraft for copying its Word GUI?

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My first thought is yes since any litigation is very difficult on any small organization in both time and money. But would they win if it went to trial? Maybe but it would not matter since the software is open-source. They may win with one company but the next company would grab the source and modify it and Microsoft would have to sue again. It's a never ending situation.

The bigger question is can wordcraft be a replacement for word? No, not in the near future. The software is ALMOST ready. Almost does not count. And given LLM coders inability to give exact results, it may never be. I would not use it until it's ready and that will be years from now.

Also, at some point MS might open-source Office and just sell support. I would not doubt it.

I think the PC era as we have known it is on its way out. The future is AI assistants and never ending subscriptions to services your AI assistant and you can use.

I doubt Microsoft will take it seriously enough now, when it's in such an early state.

What matters here is if this `wordcraft` app gets serious widespread use and businesses (which is Microsoft's main revenue source) start using this in favour of MS Word. Then I'd say anything's possible and testing in court whether LLM-vibecoded reverse engineered-apps actually do infringe on IP-rights is something Microsoft would be willing to risk to protect their greater Office 365 subscription revenue. This is one of those actual slipery slope scenarios - first Word, then Powerpoint, then Excel, then maybe even the more niche apps like Visio, or Access or Project.

As it's reverse engineered, I wonder if copyrights even apply? It's likely Microsoft would assert its patent rights.

But firstly why would a business that depends on Word to the point they pay Microsoft for it,want to even move to a vibe-coded alternative anyway? The support you get from Microsoft is very different from an open source app, to the point many Word users wouldn't even know what Github is, let alone even know how to raise an issue there to get help.

The 'threat' this wordcraft project poses, I think is very minimal even in the long run, to Microsoft.

But side note: why even bother reverse engineering Word? The file format is very well specified - I think I've used at least 4 Word alternatives, and once wrote a basic C# app that could read and render most docx files, using the official Office Open XML SDK (https://github.com/dotnet/Open-XML-SDK).

There's tons of documentation on how to parse DOCX files, so of all the apps to reverse engineer this seems to be the most redundant one. Why bother recreating Word? Why not just build a better writing app that just so happens to save its data to docx? Indeed, they probably started with Word because it was probably the easiest to verify considering many other, independent implementations of the DOCX file format exist.

This whole effort seems very 'unthinking' - it's seems to be more of a 'because I can!' type of project rather than a genuine effort to improve the state of things with old-school word processing, which is one of those silently-operating-in-the-background type of jobs that is still very prevalent in a lot of industries, like the legal sector.

I would love to get multiple typing cursors in Word, similar to VSCode and the Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down arrow shortcut, but then if Word doesn't already have it, then this project won't implement it either because it's a mindless, carbon copy. Why bother being just a follower? Why not start adding features Word doesn't have? As someone who has to deal with 1. users of Word and 2. the outputs of Word a lot I don't see this going anywhere unless it starts actually innovating.

MSFT makes most money with Enterprise customers, business services, cloud, hosting, additional services around their eco system.

People on the street think "MS Word" when they hear Microsoft - but its much much more than that.

I doubt that these projects will last longer for more than 1 year, and I do not see how one person will navigate/coordinate large codebases if you maintain this project for 5-10++ years.

I think people underestimate where most of the work goes in rebuilding a platform like Word or Excel. Getting the UI and common cases working is the easy part. The bulk of the effort is dealing with edge cases and exceptions.

The file format docs don't tell you everything about how Excel or Word actually behaves. And a collection of public files will only get you so far. A lot of the weird stuff shows up in proprietary files that customers have been building and modifying for years.

You get a file from one customer, find a case you've never seen, figure out what Office does, implement it, and make sure you haven't broken something else. Then the next customer sends you another one, and so on.

That cycle takes years. Reading and writing DOCX or XLSX is great, but getting close to full compatibility is a much bigger job.

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As long as Microsoft doesn't see it as a threat it will probably refrain from suing. If it becomes a viable competitor it may ask for the judgement of a court.

However, the weakness is that the GUI can easily be slightly altered thereby making their lawsuit moot.