There is one thing missing in all these discussions of Microsoft and their planned, designed-in obsolesce. If there were no market, there would be no product!!!!! Now I am anything but a M$ booster, but if individuals AND companies would speak with their dollars and say, "We are not always able to communicate with what we have and we don't want anything that will further complicate this process." This discussion would not exist.

You say that 
<blockquote>Writing in his <i>bog</i> David LeBlanc, a senior software development engineer in the Microsoft Office group said it was an easy mistake to make.</blockquote>
You know "bog" is a UK English euphemism for "toilet". Quite apt really!

I agree completely with Martins comments but I think Microsoft have largely achieved the desired result of forcing users off the old office versions anyway.

How many users will be aware of, let alone able to apply these unblocking updates.

As a current user of office 97, I can now expect a growing number of other people I need to communicate with to be unable to open any office documents I send them.

Unless of course I stump up the money for office 2007.

I don't know if you missed this or if you chose not to mention it but the real reason that MS did this maneuver was to get everyone off the old Office formats and onto the new ones. 

MS has used it's formats to block competition in the past and they are desperately trying to get everyone onto the newest formats before ODF (the Open Document Format) gains enough traction to hurt their business. This whole move was strategic: "Let's just switch off the old formats and see what happens". If it worked they would be very happy and if it didn't they wouldn't have lost anything.

Let's face it they couldn't care less about the users, this was an experiment to see if they could implement a major changover to the newer formats to exclude competitors. They lost nothing in the attempt except maybe got some bad PR, and let's face it MS has never been too concerned about their image now have they?

if isnt for those humors i've never been bothered to read inq everyday!! LOL

best one for this year currently should be "boring 787"

An easy mistake...is it really? because most security issues involve microsoft operating systems. Is it not easy to simply block them all?

Thank god microsoft do not actually make firewalls.

A reference to Spaced inside a file format article, hilarious

"The helpful Vole provided a workaround for users who want to unblock the formats but the process was so complicated that it made the refinement of uranium look like something an Iranian boffin could do over his tea break."

Hahahahaha! I love you Brits... your humour is most amusing.