"The Office applications are very large, and while most people only certain features, each person uses a different set, and in the end all features are used. Trying to lock out those documents and forcing people to lose data and functionality is not really a great idea."
Unless of course maximum interoperability is your goal. I notice this doesn't stop MS from supporting plain text formats, RTF, WordPerfect etc. In this case interoperability isn't the goal of Microsoft but rather customer lock in so supporting an open standard which would allow free transferability of files is to be avoided at all costs. Supporting the Open Doc standard allows Microsoft's customers to easily defect to a competing product (Open Office)
The adaption of the Open Doc Standard is only one in a large group of recent defections away from closed and proprietary file formats.
Internationally this seems to be spreading. I spent some time poking around the world to see what people and governments especially are up to with open standards documents.
*After the tsunami hit Thailand, the government found that information sharing was nearly impossible. Each NGO (non governmental entity) and branches of the Thai government used different data and document formats. The Thai government responded by creating a common website for registering missing persons and began making the move to open file formats.
*Denmark's E-business Initiative is creating a fully implemented, centralized, ordering and invoicing process based on open standards. Expected savings 160 Million Euros.
*Argentina's national tax agency implemented a project to allow access by agencies and enterprises to its unified taxpayer database. The model was based on W3C standards together with other well developed standards for security.
*Chile - The government will develop an electronic information exchange platform that will be web-based on top of open standards (XML for data exchange; SOAP and web service). Stage One will encompass the five largest public agencies. All agencies are to be eventually included.
*India is using open technologies to promote growth. The eBiz project will create a framework for providing hundreds of government to Business (G2B) services of federal, state and local agencies through a single portal.
*Sau Paulo Brazil - The state goverment implemented a web based system for inventory of all existing information technology assets. The system also track software licenses, ICT professionals and communication's resources across government.
*The Netherlands - It recently established a Standardization Council and Standardization forum to accelerate development and use of open standards. The Netherlands has had a explicit policy for support of open standards since 2003.
*European Union - The European Union's Interchange of Data between Administrations program has middleware solution based on a set of generic specifications for exchange, dissemination and collection of data. The eLink toolkit, one of the first implementations of the specification, has been based only on open source components.
*Japan - The Government of Japan has developed software procurement guidelinesthat dictate that open standards and open document formats shall be given priority in government procurement.
*Chile - The government has issued a decree setting an open XML standard as the digital document format across government. All public agencies and services are required to format documents in XML. They are currently rolling out a three stage deployment across all governmental entities.
*India - The goverhment is developing an online service for the 600,000 companies currently incorporated in the country. Online services will include: registration of companies, payment of statutory fees, filing of tax returns and charges.
*Denmark - The country's CareMobil project uses an open specification and generic business case for the use of mobile technologies in home care for the elderly.
And these I found with just a few hours work on the web. While the city of Frankfurt Germany abandoned their Open Office project, it's clear that other governments are forging ahead, realizing that in a networked environment, open standards and protocals can provide the maximum benefit. Open standards tend to be network robust, therefore less brittle than proprietary standards. Furthermore as the ecosystem expands, this will increase demand for open document standards.
