Microsoft: Office training fears overblown

Capossela: A little bit of data, but we don't force a lot of profile information. Otherwise, people aren't going to be more likely to play with it. For us, it's not that important to know women between the ages of 24 and 32 beta-tested it. For us, it's just, "Hey, the more beta testers we can get, the more representative that is of the 500 million people that use the product."

CW: Are you getting any feedback on the new default file format -- Office Open XML?

Capossela: I think it's going to be something that corporations take different approaches on. Some companies, I think, will want the improved security. They'll want the more compact file size. And they'll want to know that they're archiving data in a format that is completely open and that 100 years from now, they won't need a copy of Word to get into one of those files.

Then there are corporations that are going to say, "You know what? This is going to take us some time, and we're going to turn the default back to the binary formats because we know those binary formats will work with everybody who has older versions of Office, without them having to download a patch. So, we are going to take a more cautious approach."

Some of it depends on what is important for the corporation itself. If they're worried about security attacks against the binary formats, XML is far and away the best way to get secure because that file format was built as a much, much more robust format. It's much harder to break into that format.

CW: Isn't it only a question of time before the hackers figure out how to break into it?

Capossela: With any piece of software, it's just a matter of time, if somebody wants to dedicate their life to do something like that. But I think it gets a lot harder. It's a little like piracy. Do you do nothing because there will be pirates out there? Or do you do things to really stop the casual pirates, stop the casual hackers [and] make it as hard as you possibly can for people to break into your applications. That's certainly what we're doing.

CW: How tough is it to revert back to the binary formats?

Capossela: It's a single switch in the Options dialog that says, for my default format, I want to use the binary formats instead of XML. It takes me about two seconds to do it on any machine I walk up to. IT, of course, will do that before they roll Office out. So it's not like you have to go do that to every machine.