Saturday, June 3, 2006

Your Old Documents Weren't Yours

Picture this: you write all your documents in Microsoft Office. You have important information, presentations and research data.

In 30 years from now, Microsoft Office will be history, Microsoft will not exist anymore, computers will be smaller than our mobile phones and extremely powerful.

Remember your Office documents? Well, no one use them anymore, Google has a very powerful Office suite Mindly that has support for mind reading, automatic translation and spell checking, conceptual summarizing and online brainstorming. This application doesn't read the deprecated doc files, and no one complains. Most people have converted their Office documents to the new formats many years ago. Including yourself.

But you discover you've still got some important documents on a backup disk. Nobody can find you a Windows system with Office. And you stare at the binary files with your great ideas. The proprietary formats were once reverse-engineered, but Microsoft destroyed all the information about that.

So now, 30 years before that, you can make a choice. In what format do you save your documents? XML, text files and PDF documents are a better choice.

{ This is not a Sci-Fi text. }

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