These comments are nonsense. What all these links are saying is that programs are more compatible with a XP virtual machine running on Linux than on Vista. They are running XP! Or course it’s going to be more compatible, that’s the whole point. You can run an XP virtual machine on Vista and get identical results. If you absolutely must run a XP emulator there’s no reason to do it on Linux specifically.
New OSs stop supporting things because they are getting better and to prevent becoming resource pigs even worse than they are they need to let some support go. This is the price of progress. It’s like you bought a new all-electric car and then started bitching that it doesn’t run on GAS!
Another Red Herring. First off, companies don’t need to upgrade to the new version, they simply need to apply the patches that come in Windows update. Docx and Docm are supported in all versions that are still supported by MS, you just need to run Windows Update. If a company can’t be bothered to do that they have bigger issues than Docx. Secondly, a person, could…wait for it…save their documents as .docs! Office 2007 lets you choose the format and if you are sending out resumes and are concerned that your company could be running a un-updated version of Word just take 2 second and save it as a .doc file. You could save it as a .wps if you wanted to be REALLY safe.
The articles are pointing out the fact that Vista stumbled out of the gate with problems which is something Microsoft has elevated to a an art form. They screwed up, they know they screwed up, and the next version is suppose to fix it. People are dual booting Linux because its FREE rather than dual booting XP at an additional cost.
Go to a Microsoft site and read what people go through making the plug ins work. They are not finger snapping fixes. I ran into a similar problem with Excel at my last job. The customer sent a file of data in a newer version and it took us a number of tries to get it to work. it was fun.