They've dropped support for 15-16 year old file formats with a workaround in place....
The old versions of Word is Word 2 for Windows, and Word 4 for Mac, and Excel 4....
The work around isn't complicated it's long because they gave you 3 methods of how to get the functionality back (the simplest way is to download 1 to 3 self installing hotfixes depending on what files you still need to access, I'm pretty sure they just didn't want to pay royalties anymore for supporting some of the non-MSFT formats nor did they really want to support nearly 20 year old binary formats) and that document has been revised as late as 2011, MSFT dropped support for Office 2003 in 2014, 11 years after release.
Yes MSFT does break backward compatibility once in awhile, but it's usually quite warranted, they offer supported workarounds or exemptions and they tend to break it once in 1-2 decades rather than once every 2 years.
Sorry but giving an example of MSFT dropping support for Word 2 or Excel 4 file formats that were designed probably in the late 80's in 2008 isn't exactly a good example of a company breaking backwards compatibility.
If your organization circa 2008 was still dependant on 2 decades old formats don't blame the vendor, you should have migrated that data, It's like complaining that verbatim stopped making floppy disks, oh noes what would you do?!
Even assuming conversion works flawless, I don't think full migration is possible.
I bet archive.org has zillions of files that now aren't easily readable anymore. Do you think it is realistic to expect them to fetch every single copy from storage and convert it? I bet they cannot even find _all_ of them, given that documents may be embedded in mailbox files of various formats, in disk images, in usenet posts, in archives using various obsolete compression methods, embedded using OLE in other files, etc.
Even if they can find them, conversion in-place may not be possible. A file inside some archive file may grow in size, making the archive file larger than the archive file format allows.
For example, a few years after they declared conversion done, somebody could find an old CD and upload an old brochure or logo. A converted version may already be available, but how would that somebody know that that file looks the same? All they have are the files, and they are different.
Except for scale, archive.org isn't exceptional here. Large corporations face the same issue. They likely will bite the bullet, though, keep around some way to convert files for a few years after they declare to be 'done', and accept that some data will be lost after that.
The old versions of Word is Word 2 for Windows, and Word 4 for Mac, and Excel 4....
The work around isn't complicated it's long because they gave you 3 methods of how to get the functionality back (the simplest way is to download 1 to 3 self installing hotfixes depending on what files you still need to access, I'm pretty sure they just didn't want to pay royalties anymore for supporting some of the non-MSFT formats nor did they really want to support nearly 20 year old binary formats) and that document has been revised as late as 2011, MSFT dropped support for Office 2003 in 2014, 11 years after release.
Yes MSFT does break backward compatibility once in awhile, but it's usually quite warranted, they offer supported workarounds or exemptions and they tend to break it once in 1-2 decades rather than once every 2 years.
Sorry but giving an example of MSFT dropping support for Word 2 or Excel 4 file formats that were designed probably in the late 80's in 2008 isn't exactly a good example of a company breaking backwards compatibility.
If your organization circa 2008 was still dependant on 2 decades old formats don't blame the vendor, you should have migrated that data, It's like complaining that verbatim stopped making floppy disks, oh noes what would you do?!