John Gruber discusses how the U.S. State Department is limited to the default font choices in Microsoft Word because otherwise people would open totally malformed Word documents:

Why is the corporate communications for the most powerful department of state in the world — that the world has ever known — governed by the technical limitations of Microsoft Fucking Word?

(Capitalization mine because that feels like a proper noun for the name of the product.)

Despite what we may otherwise think, we are incredibly constrained by technology.