Microsoft may lose to ODF in California

California has introduced a bill to make open document format (ODF) a mandatory requirement for agencies when acquiring software.

Microsoft is peddling its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format which was released in Office 2007. However its competition, ODF has been recognised as a global standard and been given an ISO stamp by the International Standards Organisation. There are Open source products, such as OpenOffice.org, which already have included ODF as their default standard document format. Vole is being pressured to make ODF an integral part of future releases of Microsoft Office.

The new bill is being bought in by Californian Democrat Mark Leno. It stipulates that by 2008 agencies must be equipped to store and exchange documents in an open, XML-based format. Despite the name Microsoft's Office Open XML would fail the open standards test.

Still it is a long way from being a done deal, and Microsoft has not even started its lobbying exercises.

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