Tim Bray mentions a forum he participated on, dealing with the Massachusetts/ODF brawl that's breaking out:

I spent Thursday the 27th in Boston; I was invited by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center to participate in a round-table discussion of interoperability and standards in general, and the current Massachusetts/ODF brouhaha in particular. It was interesting and instructive, and I recommend that anyone who cares about this check out the recording. To help understand the context, there is this guy in the room from ACT who was pushing back pretty hard against the new Massachusetts policy. His arguments are lifted pretty well word for word from the Microsoft talking points, which was useful as the event might otherwise have been a love-in.

The point that many people make about this is that MS Office is the de-facto standard for document interchange, and that moving to another toolset is therefore a large risk. The question I have is this: Is it really? Cincom's IT group is pretty heavily invested in Microsoft technology, and most of the documents that get created by employees are Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Now, readers of this blog know that I have a fairly low opinion of the competing tools - they come across as clones of MS Office, copying (to my mind) all the irritating crap that makes me dislike MS Office in the first place. Having said that, I've never receieved a Word document that I couldn't open in Open Office (and I don't have the latest rev installed, either). I suppose there are shops that have invested heavily in office automation, building various tools off of Office using the COM apis. But I suspect that they are a minority, and - even for them - most of the work product produced is just simple documents with few macros.

Heck, I can't recall the last Word document I received with macros in it, and with Excel, the macros I see tend to be simple - sums and such. In other words, stuff that the competition handles pretty well. Which means the following - I expect that most shops could start using Open Office (et. al.) tomorrow and not suffer any real interoperability problems. MS has done a good job of feasting off of their de-facto standard status, but it's all held up by a wall of assumptions. I rather expect that Massachusetts will have far fewer problems using a competing product than MS would have you believe - and that's what they are afraid of.

It's kind of like the situation that French wine found itself in recently. For a very long time, French wine was perceived to be the best in the world, and sellers were able to charge a premium based on that perception. Over time, various competing sellers popped up with much, much lower costs - Chilean, Australian, and Italian wines, for example. For a variety of reasons (some political, some price based), people started trying out the alternatives over the last few years and discovered two things:

• The alternatives weren't worse - they were at least as good
• The alternatives were a lot cheaper

That's what put French vineyards into a world of hurt - the loss of caché cost them their premium price (and a fair bit of their sales volume). That's exactly the situation MS could find itself in, if enough people try out the competing products and start saying "hey - this is no worse, and it's a ton less expensive!" That's what MS is worried about.