I am deeply disappointed that a company like Microsoft doesn't make a point of Microsoft Word being able to open any document created by any version of Word, no matter how ancient it is. I think they have the social/historical/economical responsibility of doing so.
If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software.
EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void.
EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.
If they are worried about vulnerabilities in the old parsing code, move it to an external process, run it under isolation in a sandbox to spit out a newer readable version on the fly, but don't eliminate this capability from the software.
EDIT: zokier pointed out to me that the desktop version of Word opens the file fine, it is only the web version that doesn't. So, consider this post void.
EDIT 2: Well it opens the document, but is not able to display or print the embedded graphics, it seems.