A simple business concept: You distribute the desease and then sell the medicine (which happens to get your customers in unhealthy conditions, so they need even more). Look at the antivirus industry. Rather than that security defects are patched by the software provider in due time the public is put in the perception that you have to scan your harddisc during lunchbreak for malicious software and sign up to an expensive antivirus toolkit contract. No cure in sight of course and regulators are reluctant to make the software vendor you have a service contract with liable for not fixing its own bugs in due time, so that the software doctor's business can prosper.
Would it work to promote OOXML and the next generation ooxml implementations (let us coin them code name "Greenhorn")? eWeek's Larry Seltzer:
Obviously, Microsoft would like to have us all move to the new formats, mostly by virtue of moving to Office 2007, but that's not happening soon and Microsoft's not making us do it. In fact, Office 2003 will be getting security updates for five more years, until April 8, 2014, the same date security fixes for Windows XP will end.
Needless to say that this is about the implementation. He is speaking here about earlier implementations to support the format. He talks about support for the format as such.
…the damage from targeted attacks can be immense, and many users may be exposed. If Microsoft is going to claim to support the old formats for five more years, it needs to make security updates for them a high priority for five more years.
You can be sure that the corpus of existing binary document formats will be continued to be supported. The only revelevant question is if the next generation will be OOXML or ODF.
Will we listen to the binary insecurity tune to force customers to upgrade?
Whether OOXML Wins Or Not, Older MS Docs Aren't Safe
Here is another one to sell the next Office generation: the old binary formats are not "open". Diabolic laughter included.