Will Microsoft Remove DOC Format Support?

"I noticed a curious argument in Jonathan Corbet's LWN article "Supporting OOXML in LibreOffice" (behind a pay wall). Why should we support OOXML?

"…as has been pointed out in the discussion, Microsoft will, someday, phase out support for its (equally proprietary) DOC format, leaving OOXML as the only real option for document interchange. There appears to be little hope that Microsoft's ODF support will be sufficient to make ODF a viable alternative. So any office productivity suite which aspires to millions of users, and which does not support OOXML, will find itself scrambling to add that support when DOC is no longer an option. It seems better to maintain (and improve) that support now than to be rushing to merge a substandard implementation in the future.

"Really? The same company that is unable to fix a leap-year calculation bug from 20 years ago because of fears it might break backwards compatibility is going to remove support for their binary formats?"

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