Another reason for Microsoft to put OOXML in the wastebasket

Yes, that's right

Office 2008 suffers from having two of its most important features -- compatibility with Apple's Intel processors and Microsoft's new Office 2007 file formats -- be things that users can't directly or immediately see.

By the author's own admission, there was no review available on time and this post was too shallow and speculative. Search the Web and you'll immediately find that this promise from Microsoft was empty. Example:

Office 2008 and Office 2007 Compatibility Headache

[...]

After some testing, this is what I discovered. When I saved an Office 2008 document in the .docx format, Office 2007 stripped out some of the spaces. By some, I mean a lot of spaces, including spaces between words as well as a series of leading spaces used to align text. If I saved the same document using Office 2008 in the .doc format (i.e., Word 97), I had no portability problems between the Mac/Windows versions of Office.

Also see this older one. which considered only a beta release:

Although "total integration with Windows Office users" has always been a promised feature -- and chief selling point -- of Office for Mac, longtime users know that compatibility is easier said than done. While pre-Office 2007 Word, Excel and Access files created in Office for Windows may be viewable or editable on the Mac, the same cannot be said for e-mail data files created in Outlook for Windows. Considering the importance of e-mail in the office, we find the lack of platform synergy both confusing and irritating.So, how does the Office 2008 beta handle these two hurdles? The results, sadly, are mixed.

This is interoperability? Microsoft seems unable to maintain fidelity even with its own software across platforms. How unmaintainable is OOMXL? ⬆

From the Campaign for Document Freedom