[Paul12345534]

His biggest issue is he didn't have a CD reader? A basic USB DVD reader is cheap and sometimes quite handy. To say you lost your documents implies a lack of effort. If they were THAT important, you would get them.

As far as proprietary in general, MS Office has done a pretty good job other than their Office 2003 XML stuff which had to be broken when they lost the patent ruling to i4i. Anyone looking at document longevity now can easily use their XML formats.

[jobu]

I would be very surprised if Keynote '09' would even run in Mavericks. When I upgraded to Lion a couple years back I couldn't use any of the iWork suite that came with the computer. Fortunately I had only made a couple throwaway presentations and documents at that point, but it taught me a lesson about Apple's approach to planned obsolescence.

[chasing]

Keynote '09 works just fine on Mavericks.

[jjoonathan]

After installing an update. Before you install the update it crashes on Mavericks.

[stefan_kendall3]

And you forgot Poland.

[fredoralive]

iWork '09 works on Mavericks.

[nsxwolf]

Let's admit that is a terrible user experience. Buy a piece of obsolete hardware you will use only once, just because Apple didn't make an installer available for an old version - or better yet, a conversion tool - either stand alone or built into the "Open..." action of the new version of the application.

[stefanu]

You are right, I can get all the necessary hardware for that. That is not a problem, problem is that I can't have that when I need it. Imagine you go to a meetup and would like to show some older presentations and you are not aware of the issue. Well, bad luck - nothing to show, no quick fix by downloading a conversion tool or older version of the software.

I'm not saying that it is permanent problem, there is solution for it for sure. It is just unnecessarily cumbersome and mostly unexpected: I can imagine dropping support for files from 1995 not for files from 2008.

[FollowSteph3]

I think that's the key most people are forgetting here. You're talkng maybe 5 years ago, even more recent. When you go back 10+ years it's not unreasonable to expect some drop in support. But 2 versions is way way too quick!!

[Paul12345534]

When I made this comment, the headline was worded differently.