[mcooley]

> Microsoft implemented it back in their glory days (irony intended) by changing the file formats in new versions of the Office suite so that documents created by newer versions of Office could not be read by older versions, thus forcing everyone to upgrade to the newer version in order to share data.

In fact, Microsoft released updates for older versions of Office (back to Word 2000, apparently!) which allowed them to read the new formats [1].

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Open-a-Word-2007-do...

[nness]

Not to mention the fundamental differences between pre-2007 and Office 2007 document formats. I tend to think that the format change wasn't a forced deprecation of older software, but rather just a simple business case. Simplify maintenance and support, and create an open-ish standard to avoid competition + support industry.

[Aloha]

the old binary formats for office were the collected history of 20 years of software development, and even Microsoft had trouble with consistent implementation - at least OOXML had a digestible easy to use standard.

[jlawer]

I imagine this is more talking about Word 6 and Office 97 then the later versions. The 2000 upgrade was forced by the aim of making the office XML files the new standard as opposed to the competing OASIS (OpenOffice) standard.