You could not exchange documents with someone with a 4 years older Office. And this simple feature, exchanging data, had to be enforced by legal pressure...
Say what? Uh, no. Office has always allowed exchanging data to where ever, from where ever. I think you've drank too much of some funky cool aid. Word has always allowed saving to and from the 1997 version (.doc), or to other formats (.txt, .rtf, .xml, .xps, .wps), it also allows saving to .pdf, and the newer .docx format in both strict and non-strict. You could always access the document via COM/OLE as well, and read and manipulate it, and there were public hooks for writing your own code to read/write into whatever format you wanted (they called them filters). The only thing legal pressure did was force them to include the .odt format as well, which is odd, because usually the courts get mad at Microsoft bundling stuff in that could have always been done by a 3rd party, but in this case, it wanted to opposite.
FIlters is how the older versions of word were given the capability long after release to be able to read newer version of the file format as well. For example, older versions word being able to read .docx, which came out after their release. PDF was also originally added this way as well.