Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

What the heck is going on with document standards at Microsoft? In what would appear to be an odd and uncharacteristic move, Microsoft has announced that it  will deprecate development of their own OOXML standards in favor of the ODF (Open Document Format) standards, developed by the Open Source Open Office project. Whenever Microsoft says that they are embracing open standards, little alarm bells begin to go off in a lot of minds.

It is felt in many quarters that the decision (if it is indeed a decision and not a smokescreen) was taken in order to appease the regulators of the European Union, who have not given up quite as easily on fighting Microsoft's monopolistic practice as has the U.S. Justice department. In fact, the European Commission has announced that it will be investigating the Microsoft pledge to support the ODF by 2009.

In a statement, the Commission has said that it would investigate whether or not the Microsoft announcement really did mean "better interoperability", allowing users "to process and exchange their documents with the software product of their choice". There has been a bit too much of the old bait and switch tactic about Microsoft and Open Source / Open Standards for anyone to be very comfortable about what may be yet another empty promise.