The Time to Pounce Has Come
I agree with DonnieBoy. Microsoft will try to leverage their MSOffice monopoly to dominate the newly emerging marketplace of Web-Stack and Cloud Computing solutions. I also believe that for Microsoft, the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place on March 29th, 2008 with ISO approval of the MSOffice-OOXML document format.
For most businesses, Microsoft is the "client" in "client/server". The great transition from client/server to client/ Web-Stack /server has been slow because Microsoft was uncertain as to how they could control this transition. Some light was shed on the nature of this "uncertainty" when the Combs vs. Microsoft antitrust case brought forth a 1998 eMail from Chairman Bill to the MSOffice development team. The issue for the good Chairman was that of controlling the formats and protocols used to connect MSOffice to a Web centric world. MSOffice support for Open Web formats and protocols like (X)HTML, CSS, and WebDAV were out of the question. Microsoft needed to figure out how pull off this transition with proprietary formats and protocols. And avoid the wrath of antitrust in the process!
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What would happen if pt moved from targeting the not so open OpenOffice, to target governments and enterprises trying to set future information system requirements?
NY State is next up on this endless list. Most likely they will follow the lessons of exhaustive pilot studies conducted by Massachusetts, California, Belgium, Denmark and England, and end up mandating the use of both open standard "XML" formats, ODF and OOXML.
The pilots concluded that there was a need for both XML formats; depending on the needs of different departments and workgroups. The pilot studies scream out a general rule of thumb; if your department has day-to-day business processes bound to MSOffice workgroups, then it makes sense to use MSOffice OOXML going forward. If there is no legacy MSOffice bound workgroup or workflow, it makes sense to move to OpenOffice ODF.
One thing the pilots make clear is that it is prohibitively costly and disruptive to try to replace MSOffice bound workgroups.
What NY State might consider is that the Web is going to be an important part of their informations systems future. What a surprise. Every pilot recognized and indeed, emphasized this fact. Yet, they fell short of the obvious conclusion; mandating that desktop applications provide native support for Open Web formats, protocols and interfaces!
What's wrong with insisting that desktop applciations and office suites support the rapidly advancing HTML+ technologies as well as the applicat