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The FAA issues their "NO ViSTA" mandate, hinting that it might be permanent if they can come up with MSOffice alternatives.  They are looking at Google Apps!

Okay, so plan B does have legs.  The recent failure of ISO/IEC to stand up to the recidivist reprobate from Redmond is having repercussions.  Who would have ever thought ISO would fold so quickly without ceremony?  One day there are 20 out of 30 JTCS1 national bodies (NB's) objecting to Micrsoft's proprietary XML proposal, the MOOX Ecma 376 specfication, and the next ISO is approving without comment the placing of MOOX into the ISO fast track where approval is near certain.  With fast track, the technical objections and contradictions are assumed to be the provence of Ecma, and not the JTCS1 experts group.

Apparently the USA Federal Government divisions had a plan B contingency for just such a case.  And why not?  Microsoft was able to purchase a presidential pardon for their illegal anti trust violations.  If they can do that, what's to stop them from purchasing an International Standard?  Piece of cake!

But Google Apps?  And i say that as one who uses Google Docs every day.

The problem of migrating away from MSOffice and MOOX to ODF or some other "open" XML portable file format is that there are two barriers one must cross.

The first barrier is that of converting the billions of MS binary docuemnts into ODF XML. 

The second is that of replacing the MSOffice bound business processes that drive critical day to day business operabions. 

Google Apps is fine for documents that benefit from collaborative computing activities.  But there is no way one can migrate MSOffice bound business processes - the workgroup-worflow documents to Google Apps.  For one thing Google Apps is unable to facillitate important issues like XForms.  Nor can they round trip an ODF document with the needed fidelity a

Excuse me!  Excuse me!  Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?

NiST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is authorized by the USA Department of Commerce. 

Years ago, in conjunction with the Department of Defense (WWI), the Dept of Commerce joined with two manufacturing consortia to form ANSI.  Int eh aftemath of WWII and the formation of ISO/IEC, the US Congress, at the behest of the Department of Commerce, authorized the NiST subdiary.  NiST then authorized (and continues to oversee) ANSI to take on the USA representation at ISO/IEC.

ANSI in turn authorized INCITS to take on the ISO/IEC document processing specific standardization issues.  It is INCiTS that represents the citizens on the ISO/IE SCT 1 workgroups (wk1) responsible for both ISO 26300 (OpenDocument - ODF) and Ecma 376 (MOOX).

Okay, so now we have the technical staffers at NiST refusing to allow purchases of Vista, MSOffice 2007 and IE 7.0.  What's going on?  And why is this happenign near everywhere at this exact same moment in time?

The answer is that this is clearly plan B. 

Plan A was to force Microsoft to enable MSOffice native use of ODF.  The reasoning here is that governments could force Microsoft to implement ODF, the monopolist control over desktops would be broken, and the the threat of MS leveraging that monnopoly into servers, devices and Internet systems be averted.

The key to this plan A was to mandate purchase requirements comply with Open Standards.  And not just any "Open Standards".  Microsoft had previously demonstrated how easy it was to use ECMA as rubber stamp for standards proposals that were anything but open.  This is why in August of 2004 the EU asked the OASIS ODF Technical Committee to submit ODF to ISO/IEC.  ISO had not yet been corrupted in the same way as the hapless money hungry ECMA.

Plan A was going along

Martin LaMonica report of the 2005 ODF Summit Conference. Note IBM's plan to draft a proposal for the "OpenDocument Foundation."