MS Lost

There has been an agreement between the British National Archive and Microsoft "to invest in a solution that would grant access to their legacy data."

The BBC nail this when they quote Gordon Frazer (MD of MS UK): "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."

It reminds the Gorse Fox of stories of kids being paid to break windows so that the local glazier could get some business. As the BBC says:

This is a surprisingly honest statement from a company that is the largest provider of incompatible and undocumented legacy file formats in the world.

Thanks to the co-operation of many companies that find themselves in strong competition, but understand the necessity of preserving the encoding, there is an Open Standard for office documents: the "OpenDocument format" (ODF), which is maintained and further developed by OASIS, an international e-business standardisation organisation, and has been certified by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO). There are also many competing products that use these formats. The Gorse Fox is a great advocate of OpenOffice and for several years now has been using it as primary word processor for work at home (but because the Government are so deeply imbedded in Microsoft's pocket and so profligate with taxpayers' money... he still has to use Word at work).

That brings us back to Microsoft and its own open format, called MS-OOXML. But how can you consider MS-OOXML an Open Standard. OOXML may be subject to patent claims, and ultimately the development of the format depends completely on the future existence of one company.