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With SP3 I Render You Incompatible

Today the news started emerging that Office 2003 SP3 no longer supports older Microsoft Office file formats. When I first read this, I figured it only referred to really obscure formats. But I was wrong – it’s step 7 in trying to get everyone to use Microsoft’s OpenXML format. WTF? Has someone lost their mind?

January 3rd, 2008 Categories: AGILEAMY

http://tintos.blogspot.com Tony Casson

This issue is a much larger problem facing the world with regard to electronic documents. Without open document standards, old electronic documents run the risk of becoming unreadable byte code. Who says that Microsoft or any other company needs to support a file format that their software could read and write in 1995. Whether they define it is as security or otherwise, it is still a business decision that the company is entitled to make and this poses a problem for organizations and individuals that have hordes of older documents, particularly governments who are entrusted with storing public records. This problem was a major driver behind Massachusetts decision a few years ago to mandate that all office software used by the government support the Open Document Standard. As a result, of the MA decision and many others by public entities, Microsoft agreed to make its OpenXML an international open standard certified by ECMA.

Historically speaking, we are still in the early days of permanent electronic document storage. Compatibility issues such as this one are going to be widespread. The market will hopefully step in and rectify the problem in most cases. Where there is demand to read old formats, software may be licensed and sold that will. Where the market fails, hopefully, governments will succeed.

Steve Bergstein

Some years ago, I saw an piece on 60 Minutes, I think, about a government agency whose job it is to ensure that old government records remain legible. They maintain old hardware and software to support the various formats used for records storage. There's a big upside to a standard document format.

Steve Zweig

I personally have been using various versions of Word since 1984, and I even have Word 1.0 documents in my garage on 5 1/4″ 360K floppy disks — still perfectly readable, by the way, those old floppys really stand up well.

I'll vote for the “someone has lost their mind” option. The whole point of MS office is effortless assurance that your system can read both new files and old files. Otherwise why pay anything?

By being unreliable in this regard, MS is really shooting themselves in the foot. They have just made a very powerful argument for open office or other open formats.
http://www.zoliblog.com Zoli Erdos

Tony,

You're right, they don't need to support ancient formats forever, bu they should provide a conversion tool.
Ross

It seems to me the crazy thing here is that they would remove support from an existing product. I can fully understand that Office 2009 (or whatever creative name the new version will have) doesn't support old formats but why remove it? Oh yeah, that's why, they want to do all they can to force us to upgrade…
Bruce

Even Microsoft admits they went too far – < . “>http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/05/ms_offic…

They've also provided a tech note to let people restore basic functionality after applying SP3. Not a trivial effort, however. < . “>http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us>….

Tony Casson

This issue is a much larger problem facing the world with regard to electronic documents. Without open document standards, old electronic documents run the risk of becoming unreadable byte code. Who says that Microsoft or any other company needs to support a file format that their software could read and write in 1995. Whether they define it is as security or otherwise, it is still a business decision that the company is entitled to make and this poses a problem for organizations and individuals that have hordes of older documents, particularly governments who are entrusted with storing public records. This problem was a major driver behind Massachusetts decision a few years ago to mandate that all office software used by the government support the Open Document Standard. As a result, of the MA decision and many others by public entities, Microsoft agreed to make its OpenXML an international open standard certified by ECMA.

Historically speaking, we are still in the early days of permanent electronic document storage. Compatibility issues such as this one are going to be widespread. The market will hopefully step in and rectify the problem in most cases. Where there is demand to read old formats, software may be licensed and sold that will. Where the market fails, hopefully, governments will succeed.

http://intensedebate.com/people/steve_zweig4157 steve_zweig4157

I personally have been using various versions of Word since 1984, and I even have Word 1.0 documents in my garage on 5 1/4" 360K floppy disks — still perfectly readable, by the way, those old floppys really stand up well.

I'll vote for the "someone has lost their mind" option. The whole point of MS office is effortless assurance that your system can read both new files and old files. Otherwise why pay anything?

By being unreliable in this regard, MS is really shooting themselves in the foot. They have just made a very powerful argument for open office or other open formats.

Zoli Erdos

Tony,

You're right, they don't need to support ancient formats forever, bu they should provide a conversion tool.

http://intensedebate.com/people/steve_bergs2127 steve_bergs2127

Some years ago, I saw an piece on 60 Minutes, I think, about a government agency whose job it is to ensure that old government records remain legible. They maintain old hardware and software to support the various formats used for records storage. There's a big upside to a standard document format.

http://intensedebate.com/people/ross2308 ross2308

It seems to me the crazy thing here is that they would remove support from an existing product. I can fully understand that Office 2009 (or whatever creative name the new version will have) doesn't support old formats but why remove it? Oh yeah, that's why, they want to do all they can to force us to upgrade…

http://intensedebate.com/people/bruce2096 bruce2096

Even Microsoft admits they went too far – <http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/01/05/ms_offic…

They've also provided a tech note to let people restore basic functionality after applying SP3. Not a trivial effort, however. <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us>….

With SP3 I Render You Incompatible

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