CNET News: New Office Locks Down Documents

“As digital media publishers scramble to devise a foolproof
method of copy protection, Microsoft is ready to push digital
rights management into a whole new arena–your desktop…

“The new rights management tools splinter to some extent the
long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC
users have been able to count on opening and manipulating any
document saved in Microsoft Word’s ‘.doc’ format or Excel’s ‘.xls’
in any compatible program, including older versions of Office and
competing packages such as Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and the
open-source OpenOffice. But rights-protected documents created in
Office 2003 can be manipulated only in Office 2003.

“‘There’s certainly a lock-in factor,’ said Matt Rosoff, an
analyst with Directions on Microsoft. ‘Microsoft would love people
to use Office and only Office. They made very sure that Office has
these features that nobody else has…'”

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