The agreement to not sue someone doesn’t ensure the openness required for any future for the standard. Microsoft’s simply responding to governments that require standards-compliance. Rather than move Microsoft’s own formats into compliance, they are simply moving the goalposts.

One need look no further than Microsoft’s historical (and current) lack of support for Web standards to understand their motives.

This would explain alot, since here in Australia perceptions and uptake of open source are rather backward when compared to trends the world over.

I believe you, but got any data supporting out that hypothesis, Jez?

I have heard that 47% of all statistics are made up on the spot, but I’m not sure whether to believe that figure — seems a bit high to me.

To answer your final question: I think this is a case of MS trying to kill open standards in favour of presenting their own solution as a “standard”. To put it another way, they’re appropriating the word “standard” to help enforce their monopoly. There’s no benefit to the world, just a benefit to MS.

ODF is open. DOC is closed, with a little peek to justify some PR and anti-ODF FUD.

“A bunch of questions come to mind, including this: just how far is Microsoft prepared to go in making its specifications available to developers? (only about 30 of the promised 30,000 documents have been made available so far). Will it just be the bare minimum for us to get things done, or is this interoperability commitment the real deal? And after opening up the protocol, is open-sourcing the code behind any of Microsoft’s applications the next logical step?”

These question are already answered and essentially written in stone for open source solutions.