Did you ever have this happen to your picture file?

   You can't load it into another paint program.
   You need a converter to adopt to "ZooPaint" release 2.0 or a new
    hardware feature.
   You must "export" and "import" to use it in a page layout program.
   You can't move it to another brand of computer.

What about interchanging musical scores, digitized audio, and other data?
It seems the only thing that does interchange well is plain ASCII text
files.

It's inexcusable. And yet this is "normal" in MS-DOS.