http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/technology/22soft.html
"Microsoft Plans to Ease Format Rules"

Standards and Lock-in
commentary by Mark Pearson

This article describes how Microsoft is planning to open up its
Microsoft Office document formats and have them approved as a
standard by an international standards body.

It appears Microsoft has done this in response to government
pressure -- I've noticed many other news articles in the last few
months that describe how governments (such as Massachusetts) have
chosen competitor's office suites because of the fear of being
locked-in by Microsoft.

My first thought upon reading this article was whether this
standardization of the formats matters.  If Microsoft Word, for
instance, continues to save documents by default in .doc formats,
most offices will end up passing .doc files around.  While an open
standard will allow them to save these documents in the new format
and then switch to a different office software suite, this will
require conscious effort on their part.  However, in reading the
Q&A linked to from the press release referenced by this article, I
learned that Microsoft is actually changing the default file format
to this open standard.  Thus this standardization is likely to
empirically significantly reduce lock-in.

Another risk to the public would be that Microsoft adds proprietary
extensions to the standard, as they did to Sun's Java standard, in
an attempt to get people to only use Microsoft's implementation of
Java.  But the standards body and the committee of interested
companies that will approve the standard and all changes to it seem
to be quite respected; this worry should probably not be that
significant.

Microsoft's latest proposed initiative -a foray into the software
as-a-service model- may have something to do with this open
standard proposal.  With an open standard, any business can
exchange documents with any internet-based service application
provided by Microsoft.  Thus an open standard might increase the
number of possible customers for services Microsoft implements.

There are a number of other interesting questions to consider that
I don't have space for.  For instance, how will this new open
standard effect Sun's open document standard?  Will one win, or
will they both coexist as RSS and Atom (feed standards) seems to be
doing?  Also, will having a standard that requires changes from a
slowly moving standards body reduce the speed of innovation in
office software?  Or will an open standard speed up innovation? 
And will we even be able to recognize the answer to these questions
in retrospect?