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.

Tony,

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

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…