Microsoft Takes Heat for Office 2003 SP3 File Format Blocking
CorelDraw .CDR files are one of the formats that have been blocked. — Microsoft is facing criticism from a competitor and some customers for its decision to block some older file formats with Office 2003 Service Pack 3, which it released last September.
Context & Ripple Effects
The criticism lands in the middle of an unusually hostile stretch for Microsoft's Office franchise. In March 2007 the U.S. DOT barred its agencies from upgrading to Vista, IE7, and Office 2007 over compatibility concerns (the DOT ban), and through late 2007 the company was fighting accusations of strong-arm tactics in its push to make Office Open XML an international standard (Wired's report on alleged bullying and bribery). Now the flashpoint is backward compatibility itself: Service Pack 3, released in September 2007, silently blocks older binary formats — including rival Corel's .CDR files — a move first flagged by CNET on January 3 and picked up by AppScout within a day.
What makes this one sting is that it arrived via a routine maintenance patch rather than a product launch, so affected customers discovered the restriction only after installing it. A competitor publicly calling out the change gives the format-neutrality argument a corporate champion at exactly the moment Microsoft is asking standards bodies to trust its openness commitments.
First-order effects
- Customers running Office 2003 who installed SP3 lose the ability to open legacy documents — including CorelDraw .CDR files — without extra steps, turning a security update into an unexpected workflow break.
- Corel gets a ready-made grievance to publicize: its file format is now treated as untrusted inside the world's dominant office suite.
Second-order effects
- Competitors and open-format advocates gain fresh evidence for their case in the ongoing Open XML standards fight, arguing Microsoft controls access to documents even in 'maintenance' releases.
- Microsoft is pushed into defensive documentation work — explaining which formats were cut and why — diverting the SP3 rollout from a security story into a trust story.
Third-order effects
- Service packs become de facto policy instruments: if a patch can retire file formats, enterprises will demand pre-deployment disclosure of behavioral changes, not just vulnerability lists.
- File-format compatibility hardens into a regulatory and competitive battleground, where every gatekeeping decision by a dominant vendor is contestable by rivals and standards bodies alike.
The trend: As Office's format wars move from product launches into patches and standards proceedings, file-format control is becoming the primary lever of platform competition.