Both for IBM business and for private I receive many documents. In the most cases I can open and process (read, print, or edit) them, but a good chunk has trouble displaying correctly or even opening them. This happened on my Windows machine because of incompatible versions of Microsoft Office, this happens these days because of proprietary document formats that are not fully supported on my Linux machine. A lot of the problems could be avoided by making people more aware of the issues and pointing them solutions that are portable and work across the different systems (Windows PC, Apple iOS, Linux, UNIX machines, iPad, Android devices, etc.).
So I was happy this morning when I heard about the Document Freedom Day that is celebrated today. Its purpose is to raise awareness about open standards. It is about making sure you can still access and open existing documents in some years from now on and about exchanging information so that everyone can process it.
BTW: IBM offers under the InfoSphere Optim brand solutions for Application Retirement, so that in some years you can still access and find data old, offline data.