Hasn't MS caused a stir with the SP3 release of Office 2003 ? I think Gavin Bollard summed it up quite well by saying,

 "The official excuse is that these file formats are less secure but I think it has more to do with making sure that people upgrade. How long will it be before they declare Office 97 unsafe in order to force a move to Office 2007 and XML?"

If you look at the technote, and it's one of those technotes that says, this is our "enhancement" but here is the work around if you don't want it. I find believing that older formats are a security risk harder to believe than there are still WMD's in IRAQ. If this is true (that there is a securitry risk), then maybe they should also block access to users to starting up Exchange 2003 as well... Sarcasm aside, MS are only offerring a huge free pass to the ODF movement. First of all, wouldn't you mitigate the risk of file format "security risks" from the application perspective ? Secondly if it's such a damn problem, wouldn't you then NOT advise the user 3 methods on how to work around it ?

Well, the chit chat about long term file storage and whole ODF movement now gets a nice free kick for this one. Hopefully it will further demonstrate MS reluctance to reduce it's neurotic grip of the desktop. 

Star Office 8.0 is out now...