On Tuesday 2 November 2004 18:29, anahata wrote: > On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 09:20:46AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote: > > How did M$'s proprietary Office file formats every break anyone's > > system overnight? > > Not quite that, but more than once they changed the formats between > successive versions of Word etc. so the old program couldn't read files > created by the new one. After a while people with the old version would > get fed up with receiving Word documents that they couldn't read, so > they upgraded. I've seen it happen myself, and I've heard a story of a > managing director being send a complimentary copy af a new version, and > then the whole company spending thousands on a needless upgrade so the > rest of them could read the boss's office memos. They did this quite a lot in the mid 90s. There was a lot of grief with various upgrades to Office, but it seems to have stopped in recent years. They may be evil (in the sense, your honour, of having been found to have behaved anti-competitively in some jurisdictions) but they're not stupid and they realised that the forced upgrade cycle at several hundred bucks a seat was a trick they could only pull two or three times, and the Word 97 format is still the de facto standard for business documents. I run it under Crossover Office and I've not yet had a problem not being able to open attachments from clients and associates running later versions. Which is why their main business objective is now to switch software from a purchase to a subscription model. Edward Barrow
