OpenDocument

Brendan's comment about the open standards process and the control big vendors have over that process is exactly right. The standards contsortia are pay to play orgs controlled entirely by big vendors. OASIS and the OpenDocuemnt Technical Committee are not exceptions to this problematic and troublesome truth.
The First Law of the Internet is that Interoperability trumps everything - including innovation. The problem with vendor driven open standards is that innovation ontinually trumps interoperability. So much so that interop is pretty much an after thought - as is the case with ODF and OOXML!
The future of the Open Web will depend on open source communities banding together with governemnts and user groups to insist on the First Law of the Internet: Interoeprability. If they don't, vendors will succeed in creating slow moving web standards designed to service their product lines. Vendor product lines compete and are differentiated by innovative features. Interoeprability on the other hand is driven by sameness - the sharing of critical features. Driving innovation down into the interop layer is what the open standards process should be about. But as long as big vendors control that process, those innovations will reside at the higher level of product differentiation. A level tha tcontinues to break interoperability!

good article from Eric Lai of ComputerWorld. Written on the eve of the infamous Barcelona OpenOffice.org developers conference, Eric argues that OOo isn't a real open source community. Instead, OOo is a owned and operated by Sun.
One of the more important control points Sun insists on is that of commit rights and project managers. Only Sun employees have these rights and can hold these important positions..
The more important point is made by Marbux (below: ODF is an application specific format designed exactly for OpenOffice. While other applications might partially implement ODF, interoperability and successful ODF document exchange require the OOo code base!
From Marbux: This is the only article I've found to date where IBM (Heintzman) flat out says IBM wants changes in OOo licensing, more in line with the Eclipse and Apache licenses. See pg. 2. Significant because it feeds the meme that IBM's own ODF-based development goal is proprietary closed source built on the OOo code base, e.g., Symphony, et cet.
And that has huge signficance once you realize that ODF is not the real standard; the OOo code base is the real ODF standard. Look around the world and you see that ODF adoption decisions by governments are all in reality decisions to go with StarOffice, OOo, or OOo clones. I haven't, for example, seen a single instance where a government decided to ride with KOffice. Why would they, with the interop issues between KOffice and OOo? The fact that OOo's code base is the real ODF standard will figure strongly in the comments. Couple it with Sun's iron-fisted control of the OOo code base, and you have vendor lock-in with a Microsoft partner.
But with 70 developers committed in China, where developers salaries are inexpensive, IBM will soon be in a position to threaten to fork the OOo code base using proprietary extensions. Is that their real tactic to force changes in licensing and gov

This article discusses how Microsoft might change their ways and save the company. This particular quote concerns Microsoft support for standards, and their fight to push MS OOXML through ISO as an alternative to ISO approved ODF 1.0.
The thing is, ODF was not designed for the conversion of MSOffice documents, of which there are billions. Nor was ODF designed to be implemented by MSOffice. ODF was designed exactly for OpenOffice, which has a differnet model for impementing basic docuemnt structures than MSOffice.
So a couple of points regardign this highlight:
The first is that IBM's Lotus Symphony is NOT Open Source. IBM ripped off the OpenOffice 1.1.4 code base back when it was dual licensed under both SSSL and LGPL. IBM then closed the source code adding a wealth of proprietary eXtensions (think XForms and Lotus Notes connections). Then IBM released the proprietary Symphony as a free alternative to the original Open Source Community "OpenOffice.org".
If Microsoft had similarly ripped off an open source community, there would be hell to pay.
Another point here is the mistaken assumption that users can easily switch from MSOffice to an on-line product like Google Docs or ZOHO "without having to rip our and replace their entire desktop infrastructure."
This is a ridiculous assumption defied by the facts on the ground. Massqchusetts spent two years trying to migrate to ODF and couldn't do it. Every other pilot study known has experienced the same difficulties!
The thing about Web 2.0 alternatives is that these services can not be integrated into existing business processes and MSOffice workgroup bound activities. The collaborative advantages of Web 2.0 alternatives are disruptive and outside existing workflows, greatly marginalizing their usefulness. IF, and that's a big IF, MSOffice plug-ins were successful in the high fidelity round trip conversion of wor

It's impossible to harmonize two application specific file formats. The only way to establish an effective compatibility between ODF and OOXML would be to establish a compatibility between OpenOffice and MSOffice.
The problem is that neither ODF or OOXML were developed as generirc file formats. They are both application specific, directly reflecting the particular implementation models of OOo and MSOffice.
Sun and the OASIS ODF TC are not about to compromise OpenOffice feature sets and implmentation methods to improve interop with MSOffice. Sun in particular will protect the innovative features of OpenOffice that are reflected in ODF and stubbornly incompatible with MSOffice and the billions of binary documents. This fact can easily be proven be any review of the infamous "List Enhancement Proposal" that dominated discussions at the OASIS ODF TC from November of 2006 through May of 2007.
So if Sun and the OASIS ODF TC refuse to make any efforts towards compatibility and imporved interop with MSOffice and the billions of binary docuemnts seekign conversion to ODF, then it falls to Microsoft to alter MSOffice. With 550 million MSOffice desktops involved in workgroup bound business processes, any changes would be costly and disruptive. (Much to the glee of Sun and IBM).
IBM in particular has committed a good amount of resources and money lobbying for government mandates establishing ODF as the accepted format. this would of course result in a massively disruptive and costly rip out and replace of MSOffice.
Such are the politics of ODF.

Another big endorsement for the W3C's CDF as the universal file format!

It's all about interoperability and functionality without disruption to existing business processes.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School held an Open Document Conference, October 23rd, 2006. Just a few weeks after the October 4th, 2006 resignation of Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez. This is the summary report of organizer Manon Ress. Sam Hiser represented the OpenDocument Foundation. The ZERO Interop problems that plague ODF implementation were not discussed. Strangely :) Another point not discussed is the fact that ODF is not an Internet file format. It's a desktop office suite only format. This constraint is written into the ODF charter. Interestingly, one of the problems of making ODF Web ready is that of highjacked W3C standards. Highjacking occurs when a specification or application takes existing W3C standards and changes the namespace reference to it's own. This is what ODF does. The reason for doing this is to constrain and limit the W3C standard to just those aspects implemented by the ODF reference application, OpenOffice. XForms, SVG, SMiL, XHTML, RDF/XML and RDFa are problematic examples of W3C namespaces that have been highjacked by ODF to meet the specific implementation constraints of OpenOffice. This impacts developers who rely on standard libraires to do conversions and processing. The libraries are built to the proper W3C namespace, and unfortunately assume that ODF complies. It doesn't, So developers have to investigate how OpenOffic eimplements XForms and SVG, and build special ODF libraries before they can use ODF on the Web. It can be done, i think. But it's a train wreck of a mess guaranteed to destroy the high level of web interoperability users and developers expect.

Exactly! This is also the reason why ODF failed in Massachusetts! Reducing the interoperability or functionality of of any workgroup related business process is unacceptable. Which is why IBM's rip out and replace MSOffice approach as the means of transitioning to ODF is doomed. The Office 2.0 (er 3.0) crowd is at a similar disadvantage. They offer web based productivity services that leverage the incredible value of web collaboration. The problem is that these collaboration services are not interoperable with MSOffice. This disconnection greatly reduces and totally neutralizes the collaboration value promise. Microsoft of course will be able to deliver that same web based collaborative comp[uting value in an integrated package. They and they alone are able to integrate web collaboration services into existing MSOffice workgroups. In many ways this should be an anti trust issue. If governments allow Microsoft to control the interop channels into MSOffice, then Microsoft web collaboration systems will be the only choice for 550 million MSOffice workgroup users. The interop layer is today an impossible barrier for Office 2.0, Web 2.0, SaaS and SOA competitors. This is the reasoning behind our da Vinci CDF+ plug-in for MSOffice. Rather than continue banging the wall of IBM's transition to ODF through government legislated rip out and replace mandates, we think the way forward is to exploit the MSOffice plug-in architecture, using it to neutralize and re purpose existing MSOffice workgroups. The key is getting MSOffice documents into a web ready format that is useful to non Microsoft web platform (cloud) alternatives. This requires a non disruptive transition. The workgroups will not tolerate any loss of interop or functionality. We believe this can be done using CDF+ (XHTML 2.0 + CSS). Think of it as cutting off the transition of existing workgroup business p

Bingo!

Rather than replace MSOffice, why not move the desktop bound business processes to the web? Re write them to take advantage of web collaboration, universal connectivity, and universal interop.
Once the business processes are up in the cloud, you can actually start introducing desktop alternatives to MSOffice. The trick is to write these alternative business processes to something other than .NET 3.0, MS-OOXML, and the Exchange/SharePoint Hub.