“They trusted us with their data? Will the fools never learn?”
The Service Pack 3 update to Office 2003 blocks over a dozen old file formats, effectively rendering the data inaccessible. Unless you are adept at the registry editing Microsoft cautions you against.
And they don’t warn you that you won’t be able to access the old files. Whee!
Check out my ZDnet article for the gory details. It isn’t pretty.
Update: While the SP3 does block opening a number of old file formats, the formats in question are older: all Word pre-6.0; PowerPoint pre-97; Excel 4.0 charts; dBASE II .dbf; Lotus and Quattro files; Corel Draw .cdr. See my mea culpa. End update.
Clueless droids?
How does the world’s largest software company make this kind of wrong-on-so-many-levels decision? Is there ANY adult supervision in Redmond?
The decision bespeaks a corporate culture that is painfully clueless about its customers. Gee, why would anyone want to access 5 year old Word documents?
Medical products marketing
Redmond’s blindness echoes that of Detroit’s for the last 50 years. “Safety doesn’t sell.” “Bigger is better.” “Good enough quality is good enough.” “Americans will never buy Japanese cars.”
Microsoft clearly doesn’t get the fact that their products are an intimate part of consumer’s lives, much as medicines are. When 8 bottles of Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled 31 million bottles and spent on the order of $100 million dollars to restore consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand.
Would Microsoft spend a nickel to protect and reassure consumers? I give it a qualified “maybe.”
The StorageMojo take
In case anyone thought that archiving documents in proprietary formats was acceptable, this is your wake-up call. ASCII text and probably PDFs are OK. Everything else, including RTF – which Microsoft controls – is suspect.
With the growing focus on e-discovery, there should be a market for a high-speed “any format to .txt or .pdf” appliance. Producing unreadable softcopies won’t cut much ice in Federal courts.
Comments welcome, as always.
Very few Windows users have 5 year old documents. I don’t know anyone who does. Their systems invariably crash and have to be reinstalled and of course they don’t have backups. So there are no 5+ year old documents to become incompatible.
This is EXACTLY why we need to support ODF and fight OOXML on every level. We also need to call Microsoft the crooks that they are for corrupting the ISO process.
RIF? Your white hair is showing. 🙂
Tom,
Your observation reminds me of wedding photographers who in the days of film would throw away the negatives from a wedding after 2-5 years because they assumed that half of the couples were divorced, and the other half wouldn’t order any more.
I’m still amazed that anyone would choose to use Microsoft products willingly. For digital photography and imaging they gave us sRGB which is the worst color space you could create, and EVERYONE uses it. Microsoft seems to not “get it” on so many levels.
Tony Smith says:
>Very few Windows users have 5 year old documents.
>I don’t know anyone who does.
Try Federal, State, and Local governments. You’ll find an astounding number of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files posted on their web sites!
I’m regularly asked to revive data in old formats like WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, and others even more obscure. Yes, we do a pretty good job of backing up user data. That’s what IT is for!
Archiving and distributing data in proprietary formats is wrong, but widely done — and now required by the Government.
The new e-discovery rules specifically call for original, native formats, in order to preserve important metadata and hidden data. MS Word is notorious for keeping deleted sections of files around, and the identity of the person who created the file. A fine example of the law of unintended consequences!
I like your blog, but… are You the source of this misinformation or did you read the same CNET article I did? I found it on the article on CNET and immediately got appropriately riled up, notified my coworkers, etc. Then went to the actual MS KB article that says the formats affected are Word
Many companies have Word documents older than 5 years. We have so many, I could see this being a business case to replace Word. Many companies keep years, and years of historical data in MS Office format for a wide variety of reasons.
In addition to irresponsible, I think it should be downright illegal. Why? Company A buys MS Word 6 back in the day. The product does everything they need, the staff knows how to use it, everyone is happy. Except Microsoft, who wants to make money on unnecessary upgrades. How can they do that, knowing Company A is perfectly content using the older version? By making the format incompatible with the *MICROSOFT* software other companies are using. Now Company A can continue to use Word 6 internally, but if they want to share with other companies who use Office 2007, then need a newer version of Office.
The business community has been through this scenario before. Remember when Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were popular? Some of us still do. Some of us still remember when we started getting e-mail back from people saying “I can’t open this format, can you convert this to Word?”
The funny thing is that by continually frustrating their customers with this kind of shady (or irresponsible at the very least) business practice, they are actually driving a small portion of their customers to other products. They are making a business case to at least evaluate other products. Company A has to buy new software anyway, why not see what else is out there? Maybe there is a product that will continue to support old AND new formats!
Microsoft continues to hold the high market share, but they are losing ground. Home users and businesses alike are trying alternatives in record numbers, and the trend will continue as the economy gets worse.
It will be a happy day when the business community is not beholden to the whims of a single company.