Microsoft announced that its next Office Service Pack will bring support for ODF, the standardised format used by OpenOffice which gained support from multiple governments around the world.

The good news is that it will bring the functionality with the Service Pack, but questions remain. What will be the quality of this ODF support? Current MS Office plugins to support ODF (one initiated by Microsoft, the other by Sun) are not perfect. How will the Service Pack compare? Won't this Service Pack eclipse the other plugins even if its quality is mediocre?

Another question: hasn't the competition and lock moved to another level: the content network and management?

Without becoming pessimistic, such announcements raise a lot of questions, and we'd better wait what will be delivered. The EU seems to have the same opinion.

There's been quite some controversy around the standardisation efforts from Microsoft about its Office XML formats, but for outsiders, practical illustrations of what was wrong was hard to find. This is over now with a practical study, with real examples from Stéphane Rodriguez. It is surprising to see stored values different from the values actually entered in a product as Exel.