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Two Open Document Standards Better Than One?
tsa writes "Microsoft says that the consumers should have the choice between multiple open standards for documents." From the article: "Microsoft's Yates said that OpenDocument and Open XML come from very different design points. 'In the future at some point there will be convergence,' he said. In the near term, the transition period from proprietary document formats to Open XML-based ones will be 'messy and complex,' he added. 'Competition between standards we believe is a very good thing.'"
In a lot of organizations the Legal or HR department will type up documents in Word that will be placed out on the company website. For them both content and presentation is important. You don't spend hours typing up a document and making it look nice to choose as Save as HTML feature and have it just spit out a long string of text with no formatting. If OpenOffice spit out an HTML page and a corresponding CSS file to style it up, that would be fine, but it doesn't. All those messy spans in the Word save as HTML feature help make it look the same as when you typed it up, something I'm sure most people expect.