This story talks about OpenOffice bloat relative to MS Office, but the interesting bit to me is the drive by XML reference:

Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org.

I switched BottomFeeder from an XML save format to a binary serialized file format a long while back, and it did two things:

• Save files shrank by a factor of about 10
• They loaded more than one order of magnitude faster

XML is the favorite buzzword of everyone and his brother, and the State of Massachusetts has taken OpenOffice up on the idea of replacing Office, in part because of this open file format. We'll see how much they like it after they experience extra long file load times.