Microsoft Apologizes for Disabling File Formats in Office Update
Last week we mentioned that the SP3 update for Microsoft Office blocked users from opening older file formats which Microsoft had deemed “insecure.” Members of the Microsoft Office team have since issued apologies for erroneously blaming the software’s own shortcomings on the file formats themselves and has posted some new tools to let users of Office 2003 SP3 unblock a number of file types.
David LeBlanc, a senior software development engineer with the Microsoft Office team, writes in a post on his blog that Microsoft made a mistake in attributing security problems to certain file formats.
“We stated that it was the file formats that were insecure,” writes LeBlanc, “but this is actually not correct.” Which is what we also said when news of the blocked files first surfaced. As LeBlanc correctly says, “a file format isn’t insecure — it’s the code that reads the format that’s more or less secure.”
LeBlanc goes on to note that the code in Office that handles older file formats isn’t “as robust as the code we’ve written more recently, which is part of our decision to disable them by default.”
LeBlanc also apologizes for implying that there were any insecurities in the file formats of some of its competitors like Corel, whose .cdr files were initially blocked by the update.
LeBlanc also swallows some pride to admit that “we also recognize that we have not made any of this as usable as we’d like, and we apologize that this hasn’t been as well documented or as easy as you need it to be.”
In other words Microsoft has accepted the blame and offered a solution, which we applaud. With the whole debacle coming at a time when Office competitors like online suites and OpenOffice continue to gain ground, the mea culpa may be a nice gesture, but we can’t help wondering how much it will mediate the damage and broken trust among users.
[via ComputerWorld]
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