If people outside Microsoft can get into them right now, should be a piece of cake in 100 years.
By implementing open standards, governments will have a much more certain and managable path to ensure that documents created today will be accessible in the future.
MS products are already compatible with multiple standard formats. And their new formats are even more open. There's nothing that this new ODF format provides, other than an incumbance on the constituents to load something additional and different to what most already have.
I've written applications to extract data from both PDFs and BIFF format, and I've developed systems to handle massive volumes of documents. The PDF project went much better than BIFF because the official data format specification was readily available.
So are the new formats for Office. You mean you didn't know? Or chose to ignore? BTW, this white paper specifically mentions your 100 year "dilema".
We've heard of Microsoft's XINO. The term was coined on this forum.
BTW, this white paper specifically mentions your 100 year "dilema".
It was briefly mentioned, but without the file specs, there is no way to evaluate the validity of their claim.
Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
Where are the formats? The file you linked to was a puff piece that was useless to me as a developer. Send me the official spec.
Here is a link to the PDF spec, ready to download and use with very reasonable and minimal conditions. No signup or contract is required. Even if Adobe goes out of business a hundred years from now, the spec will always be available for development purposes, including open source development or proprietary software.