@JamesR
but I'm just excited to see how quickly StarOffice etc. will leap on the file format and undercut Microsoft big-time.
Ahh.... But here's the part that's missing... quoting from the CNET article...
The company is adopting Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a second file format in all Office applications, to enable better data exchange between the productivity suite and back-end software, such as databases.
It's NOT a replacement format, it's an ADDITIONAL format. All data will still be manipulated in the proprietary formats, so while you'll be able to get the TEXT out of a Word document with XML, you still won't get the right FORMATTING, just like 3rd party programs already do.
Then, with the release of Palladium, your documents will be encrypted to the APPLICATION that created them. Part of "trusted computing", as Microsoft defines it, is that only "trusted applications" can edit your data... The catch is, you can't define which applications you choose to trust. It wouldn't matter if Microsoft then made Word's format plaintext, you couldn't open it, because it would be encrypted against a Word-specific key.
Don't think for a blind minute that Microsoft is going to give up proprietary file-access.
