...they just have support for their formats withdrawn. Or at least some older Excel, PowerPoint, and third-party file formats have been given the axe by Microsoft with the release of Office 2003 Service Pack 3 last September.

I saw this story on Slashdot the other day but didn't bring it up because after a quick review of the Microsoft support document that revealed it all, I had decided that it was overblown. It was Slashdot, after all, where the facts are never allowed to get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing. But it turns out that I misread the document: where I had believed that the patch simply prevented re-saving files in those formats, in fact users are blocked from opening them at all (unless they traipse through the steps detailed in the support document above; I'll let you decide how likely that is).

This is huge ammunition for supporters of truly open document formats, coming at a time when Microsoft is struggling to increase adoption of its Office Open eXtensible markup language (OOXML) standard over the competing Open Document Format (ODF). As Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Watch says, "Is OOXML truly open XML enough?" Microsoft has just given everyone significant reasons to think it may not be. Anything less than entirely open and perpetually licensed is open to exactly this same sort of issue with some future release of patches or programs... and OOXML is neither entirely open nor perpetually licensed.

Microsoft and their supporters will argue that they are acting responsibly by locking down potential security problems with SP3, but that misses the larger point: it may be Microsoft's mandate to improve security in its products, but this can't come at the expense of sacrificing users' control over and access to their own data.

On a larger scale, it also calls into question some of the bill of goods that Microsoft and other software vendors have been trying to sell you on the advantages of "Software+Services" over Software as a Service (SaaS). Phil Wainewright discusses the fallacy of the perpetual software license in this post. SaaS opponents like to ask you how safe your information is when you're storing it across the net, with some company that may change their policies or go out of business at any time. After episodes such as this, you have to wonder how that's any different than using Microsoft Office instead?