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A recent Danish study into conversion between ODF, DOC and OOXML concluded that MS Office was the best at dealing with all of those formats. So Microsoft need have no real fears that people will leave Office immediately if ODF was widely adopted.

http://dokumentformater.oio.dk/

But it still makes sense that Microsoft are unhappy with ODF and want to push OOXML. ODF is controlled by OASIS, and would allow much greater competition in the office software market. In the medium to long term, the Office software monopoly could be broken - if they failed to innovate and compete, that is.

http://oio.dk/ is accessible according to danish standards. Just disable CSS and you got a nice computer readable site. (In FF click view, page style, no style). It's not that hard to do, but it costs a lot extra and does put some limitations on how you render the site.

BTW, the very definition of a patent means the information is not secret.

Well, unless there are things like "Specifies whether to layout footnotes as is done in Word 6.0/95 and Word 7.0/97", where the implementation to be copied is protected by copyright and, therefore, secret.

In many ways, you're right. A good example of this is that all government institutions had to switch to "Electronic Billing", which used a XML format called OIOXML. By 2005, I think, government institutions were not allowed to accept paper bills of any kind. Only two cities/kommuner actually took this all the way: Odder Kommune is one of them. Every paper bill they recieved, would be put in an envelope and returned to the sender. I believe it's the toughest, but still best way to teach the suppliers "if you want your money, upgrade your systems".
From what I have heard, it is not efficient yet, but if the public administration would start enforcing policies like that, it would be much less time-wasting.

I bet you never took those HCI courses? Or introduction to algorithms?

Waaaay to much crap that needs to be done - and on top of that, one player figures out how to do it, scriptkiddies just copy + paste...

Ohh and all this about time>skill etc... its bullshit - the AD spent most of his/her life to get to where he/she/it is, Ill bet ya they have used many more hours to be able to do stuff like http://www.oio.dk/ in 1 hour than the average Joe has to put in to get remotely near that...

1. Say "dammit" (or "thank $DEITY", your choice :)
2. Go to the Danish government IT site and download from there

Gee, if only Microsoft would switch office over to using XML, and publish the schemas...

Oh, wait, looks like they have. Whats that? You want them to participate in standards process? Something like this?

But can they? It's one thing to file a patent, and even get the courts to uphold it. But with technology as simple as this, there's always a way around it. That's what Thomas Edison discovered when he tried to use IP law to give himself a monopoly on motion picture film. He couldn't get a patent, but he did manage to get an enforceable copyright that prevented his competitors from making film with the right kind of sprocket holes. Solution: competitors designed cameras that punched the sprocket holes as the film was being shot.

The obvious workaround here is to write and distribute the necessary plugin in a country that doesn't recognize the patent. Or simply distribute it with the same kind of guerrilla tactics that work so well for DeCSS. Lawyers can shut down one big conspicuous server, they can even put individuals in jail, but you can't stomp out simple bits of technology with a C&D letter. There are just too many informal distribution channels.

Of course, many big companies will avoid this software for fear of DMCA prosecution. But they have an alternative -- one which I personally rather prefer to simple Microsoft format transparency. The problem with WordProcessMLis that it's fundamentally as unstructured as RTF and the .DOC formats. If I wanted my OpenOffice users to be able to interoperate with my Word users, I'd prefer a format that's a little better structured. So rather than a OO plugin for Microsoft's XML, I'd want a Word plugin for OO XML. Or better yet, a truely structed document type specially designed for whatever documents are being shared.

<globallyUniqueDocID value="[id]">

<endUserPrivacy value="false">

This press release from danish govt. agency Open public Information Online (OIO) has more info.

Read the patent license for yourself. (The license for the schemas themselves is basically BSD)

Also this (danish) Computerworld article quoted MS EMEA boss Patrick de Smedt calling Interoperability a "holy grail", an "advantage to the ordinary consumer" and Competition "a very important part of our strategy." The quotes have now been removed again (why??)