You claim Micrososft Windows is the Industry Standard, I suppose you say
the same about Microsoft Word .DOC format being the document standard! Well, the Industry Standard is, and has been been for a lot of years, the Open Document Text or .ODT and it's fully compatible over all version. Those who use Microsoft and only ever use .DOC have major issues as Microsoft has used the ,DOC extension for a number of non-compatible Word formats; they are - Word,original DOS to Word for Windows 2a; Word 97, Wor2000/XP, Word 2003, Word 2007/2010 (last two also have .docx too). So which is the proper MS Standard you wish to claim as the Industry Standard?
If you have a MS Word document saved in any format prior to 2000/XP it won't open and be saved safely in Word 2003 or anything since. In some cases you can get special extension programs for Word to open and resave older format documents. That's worth keeping in mind because there are legal requirements to keep some documents like contract negotiations in their original form and with their original creation and modification dates. Open a Word 97 Document in Word 2003 with the extension program and you find the document has a new creation and modification date, thus blowing away the legal proof of their original dates.
I'm sure someone will go off their nut about keeping documents that are that old. Well, you can either store electronic documents or rooms fool of printed copies which have no record of when they were originally made. Laws from back in the 1990s allow the use of the creation and modification dates of electronic files to be valid legal evidence in many case. For legal reason the documents on contract negotiations are required to be kept for the duration of the contract, and many are also needed for the seven year take review period beyond the last tax year the contract was valid for. With the introduction of email and electronic document exchanges in the early 1990s many contract negotiations were not put on paper and signed until towards the end. I have copies of negotiation documents from the early 1990s for long term contracts that did NOT finish until Dec 2007. Final tax year was 2007/2008 as our tax years is July to June. I can destroy those Word 2a documents in July 2015. Until then I have a legal obligation to maintain them as original documents, and I've had the need to review them over the years. I've never been able to review them in MS Word 2003 or any version of Word since, but have been able to safely review them in Open Office and now in Libre Office.
edit to fix typo out - our
