CS5.5 documents not compatible with CS5 documents?

Question

I have read through the other threads and found that documents created in CS5.5 are not backward compatible with CS5.  Unless, of course, you export them manually from 5.5.
So ... Really?!  Are you kidding me that that a version 5.5 cannot talk to a version 5.x of something?  We bought a site license for the CS5 Master Collection but without the maintenance because we were led to believe that CS6 was a couple years off.  So when 5.5 came along it implied that there were some changes but not significant enough to warrant the CS6 title.
Okay, now that I have vented I will ask my real question.  Is it expected that with every release of the Master Collection that it means a major change to the product(s) underneath it such that they will not be directly backward compatible?  If this is the case I would recommend that this is better explained when you are offering up the maintenace.  Had I known this I would have purchased it as well instead of being stuck with having to purchase the entire site license again.
Thanks, Brette

Answer 1

Hey there PDX buddy,
I'm guessing from the rest of your username that you're not a professional user of page layout applications, but a sysadmin of some sort. So of course you'd be surprised to discover this:
Is it expected that with every release of the Master Collection that it means a major change to the product(s) underneath it such that they will not be directly backward compatible?
That's the case pretty much across the board for page layout applications.  Note that it's not the Master Collection - many of the apps included do have pretty functional cross-version compatibility. Illustrator, in particular, I've found to be pleasingly verbose about possible feature loss when saving back, offering to convert type to outlines when differences between type rendering engines in versions were likely to cause incorrect text display, and so on.
But backwards compatibility is not a feature of page layout applications in general. It was the case for Pagemaker, it was and is the case for Quark, and it's been that way for InDesign all along. The same is the case with more obscure layout apps. The only exception I can think of is Publisher - and Publisher projects often crash and burn because there's one person who insists on sticking with Office XP or whatever, and when you use new features of Publisher in a file and then open it in an older version, it does not degrade well. I don't think that it even told you that it wasn't going to bother to try to display some of the content that came from a newer version. I even have a vague recollection of a Quark Passport issue where there was a failure of compatibility between 5.0.1 and 5.0.2, or something along those lines - just a bugfix dot release broke compatbility with the previous release.
I'd argue that, if you need to support designers or other graphics-layout types, that software maintenance for layout applications is more important that buying software maintenance for your operating system & other software infrastructure. Heck, it's arguably equally as important as offsite backups.