What if the file formats in which we save text documents, spreadsheets, charts and presentations — all that stuff generated by so-called productivity software — were not supported by future versions of the programs used to create them today, or by some as-yet-unimagined successor products? Could drifting file formats cause a kind of corporate Alzheimer’s that threatens our ability to recall contracts, insurance policies, financial records, payroll data and other critical documents?
“This is already happening today,” says Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist at Sun Microsystems. “People are finding that documents which are as little as 10 years old are inaccessible to them now. As long as the baseline file format continues to evolve at the rate of a new format every 18 months — which it has for the past 20 years — you can guarantee that the time to sunset of a particular format is going to be something like 10 or 11 years.”
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