Old MS Office file formats were never engineered to be future proof in any way, and they're a huge headache for Microsoft, and they do indeed behave oddly in new software, and Microsoft cannot wait to get rid of them, and nobody in their right mind can blame them, honestly.
I'd like to expand on this. The Microsoft Word team is the only group of people that ever had any say over what goes in a Word document. In the old days, a Word document was nothing more than the serialized version of what Word had in memory. Photoshop files are the same way. As soon as you're not the only one with a say over the file format, you turn it into a standard. And you step up to make it a good standard because otherwise nobody's going to use it.
To keep going. Any standard that is not open will not open itself for multiple implementations (see old MS standards with word xml format). The problem of course is that if I cannot implement your standard, you are still the only consumer. So really:
Standards with producers/consumers from different independent teams from different organizations with different goals are awesome.
"Open standards /rock/." is a bit overblown, don't you think? There are still very real problems with open (read: sort of "open") standards. In the end we all just want something that works. There are indeed a great deal of proprietary solutions which satisfy this criteria, and continue to do so for many years.
We're much better off with formats that were documented with inter compatibility in mind in the first place. Historically, it's been quite difficult to build products that work with MSO formats as MS not only did not help meaningfully but actively seeks to hinder others from doing so - plus the format is buggy and odd. Read what Wikipedia has to say on the history of the .doc format:
>Some specifications for Microsoft Office 97 binary file formats were published in 1997 under a restrictive license, but these specifications were removed from online download in 1999. Specifications of later versions of Microsoft Office binary file formats were not publicly available. The DOC format specification was available from Microsoft on request since 2006 under restrictive RAND-Z terms until February 2008. Sun Microsystems and OpenOffice.org reverse engineered the file format. Microsoft released a .DOC format specification under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. However, this specification does not describe all of the features used by DOC format and reverse engineered work remains necessary.
I don't disagree. I'm just sensitive to the "open standards /rock/" thing. It glosses over a lot of nuance. What I'm trying to suggest is that something being an "open standard" does not necessarily make it better. Historically, there have been a number of open standards which have been failures for technical reasons, political reasons (within the community behind the standard), no good reason, etc.
Check this out: http://timtyson.us/archives/2008/01/theft-by-taking/
Old MS Office file formats were never engineered to be future proof in any way, and they're a huge headache for Microsoft, and they do indeed behave oddly in new software, and Microsoft cannot wait to get rid of them, and nobody in their right mind can blame them, honestly.
Open standards rock.