Comment by alkonaut
9 years ago
Ah. missed that. But obviously I'd be very happy for this program to be patched by replacing it with this program:
MessageBox.Show("This document contains an old equation and you don't have the editor. Do you want to download the old editor?");
Becuase there comes a point in time when any time you bump into an equation like this, it's actually more likely to be a malicious one.
Even better if they could at least render the old equation statically using the new office, but not edit it. Then it would be almost insanely rare that anyone needs the old editor.
This is the kind of thing that can rapidly escalate to a CTO asking his Microsoft sales VP why he's spending $18M/year on upgrade and support contracts when a report that's worked "forever" can start talking back like Clippy.
Microsoft doesn't preserve backward compatibility because they're stubborn; it's a key part of their value proposition to some of their biggest clients.
This is the thing: I'm also a paying customer, I just don't pay as much. But I'd like to pay for more security/less compatibility, instead of the other way around.
This should also be very easy to do e.g. by noticing whether you are in a setting where there is any risk of the scenario you say. If it's a home machine for example, then don't worry about compatibility, focus on security.
We've seen where that leads to: there is plenty of software out there where you'd have to open every document you wrote with version N - 1 in version N to "convert it" to N's format, and version N + 1 can't read N - 1 files at all.
That can lead to a very ugly form of bitrot quickly. Do you convert every document you've ever touched every time, even ones you haven't needed in years, just in case? Do you worry that every time you convert a file it might corrupt the file in the process? Do you find some way to keep every version of the program available at all times and play try every version until it opens the file?
Backwards compatibility in general offers much greater means for archival.
In this specific example: losing backwards compatibility for ancient equations directly threatens the archival of math and science documents. That seems like it could have huge repercussions in some fields.
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