@Asoces

I can only speak for the OpenOffice.org format, but it is a collection of XML files and other text in a Zipped file.

You can rename your OpenOffice.org files to .zip and open them with any program that can read zip files and see for yourself.

Jason, thank you for sharing your feelings.

What has your comment got to do with the competing office doc file formats?

Think about how much less electronic storage space would be required - especially if you zip the text files. 

All you need is the information, not pretty fonts and graphics.

ASCII or Unicode text.

It was good enough for the RFC's, it's good enough for anything. 

Only a fool needs more than one font or font size to delineate the parts of a document.

If we vote in John McCain in November, then, yes, this country is a worthless pile of crap.

I´ve just recently decided that it´s better to have a bitch in office than a monster, so whatever Democrat wins the nomination has my vote.

Let´s see how much we can unfsck the country from 2009 to 2013, shall we?

The way I see it, you dont need to have the document in an open format. All you need is for the reader to be able to read it. What open source reader cannot open up simple government documents in MS formats?

I think we are talking about openoffice here. I never had an issue doing such things with even old versions of openoffice. I cant imagine any great point to this massive undertaking of changing the way a government and all public places (libraries, etc) do data storage.

pointless? missing the point am I? shrug.

Of course Microsoft wants to join the ODF and OOXML standards, that would take several years to get the merged standard done and get the software out.

In the meantime any government or corporation that wanted to store their documents in an open format would be forced to wait on this and Microsoft figures they'd probably just stick with Office while they waited.

So let me get this straight: There are currently 2 competing standards, one open and one closed. In order to stick to using an open standard, this New York "techie" thinks that a third standard should be created that's a hybrid of the closed and open standards, which have comparable functionality already. 

This makes absolutely no sense. The end goal would be to create something that already exists. It's called .odf.