first step on a long road: Microsoft Office to support document conversion to ODF

Microsoft has announced that it intends future versions of Office to support Open Document Format, the international open XML document format used by other developers.

In other words, it is intended that future Microsoft Office software will be able to convert files to and from ODF.

That seems to suggest that Microsoft have finally come to the realisation that inter-operable formats are an important feature of desktop software.
However ODF will not be the default format of Microsoft Office, so documents created in office will not be automatically intelligible to other document processing software including systems supported by Novell, IBM, Canonical etc, instead a user of Microsoft Office will have to take an extra, intentional step to save a document in ODF.

It is good news for people who use Microsoft products since they will, when this is implemented, and depending on how it is implemented, they can expect to generate documents which the users of other document processing software can read, and be able to read documents generated by others . The changes to Microsoft Office to enable it to save into ODF, obviously enhances the value of Microsoft’s product to its users.

However this mustn’t be mistaken for a commitment to a global open XML standard. If Microsoft wanted to ensure a single open XML document format used around the world it would request ISO to withdraw the controversial OOXML specification.