Comments on: HOWTO: Pressure All Microsoft Office Users to Embrace OOMXL (Updated) http://techrights.org/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/ Free Software Sentry – watching and reporting maneuvers of those threatened by software freedom Fri, 25 Nov 2016 09:41:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.14 By: Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/comment-page-1/#comment-4709 Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:43:45 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/#comment-4709 They really ought to ‘patch’ (they claimed security was the issue) all those converters rather than render them deprecated. That’s no way to preserve people’s valuable information. If expiry comes after 12 years, how might one expect to access data 20, 50, or hundreds of years from now? The formats were never formally documented either (except for in the source code, which we know contains bugs like that leap year insanity).

The accuracy of these recent reports is probably less relevant than implications related to intent. I urge you to read this article from Forbes:

Alexander Rose, the executive director of the futurist Long Now Foundation, worries about the impermanence of digital information. “If you save that computer for 100 years, will the electrical plugs look the same?” he asks. “The Mac or the PC–will they be around? If they are, what about the software? ” So far there’s no business case for digital preservation–in fact, for software makers like Microsoft, planned obsolescence is the plan.

“The reality is that it’s in companies’ interest that software should become obsolete and that you should have to buy every upgrade,” Rose says. We could be on the cusp of a turning point, though, in the way businesses and their customers think about digital preservation. “Things will start to change when people start losing all of their personal photos,” Rose said.

]]> By: Yuhong Bao http://techrights.org/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/comment-page-1/#comment-4708 Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:22:16 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/#comment-4708 I figured out the problem now. the problem is not in the old file formats themselves, but in the converters for the old file formats.

]]> By: Roy Schestowitz http://techrights.org/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/comment-page-1/#comment-4706 Sun, 06 Jan 2008 01:37:56 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/#comment-4706 No, even a Microsoft executive has pretty much confirmed that there was a ‘mistake’ . I reckon that they realise that their maneuver was bad for their image, so they pretended that someone somewhere in the company wrote an incorrect knowledgebase article. I’d have to look more carefully at the details, but it seems like Microsoft is trying to weasel out of this one with excuses (I know this because it’s a pattern I’ve observed for years).

See Rob Weir’s article about no known security issues. Or maybe we should give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt it. I guess it’s up for you to decide.

]]> By: Yuhong Bao http://techrights.org/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/comment-page-1/#comment-4694 Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:02:42 +0000 http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/02/office-obsolescence-excuse/#comment-4694 By default, only those formats older than word 6 is unsupported. I am sure there may be security vulerablities in the converters for the old formats.

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