Microsoft's sudden decision to support ODF has caught everyone on the hop - and there's still lots of scepticism about it.

"Microsoft latest bullshit", is the response from the OOXML is defective by design blog, which says Microsoft is planning to "embrace extend and extinguish" the ODF format. ODF will always be a second-class citizen in Office, and is only there to keep people buying it, and to increase the number of Office 2007 documents in the world, is the argument there.

That's just paranoia, says Alex Brown. He's the man in charge of turning OOXML into a formal standard, and his job just became a lot less urgent. Indeed, if ISO-OOXML support doesn't arrive till Office 14 it just got put on the backburner, and we might wonder whether it will ever be really required.

"I think for users it's very good news, and for standardisers it's good
news at it takes the heat out of the 'format wars' and re-establishes
battle lines where they should be: product vs product (not format vs
format)," said Brown in an email to ZDnet.

He's not a Microsoft apologist. "Microsoft have over the years gathered a deserved reputation as being one of the worst software companies in the world at respecting standards, particularly for their mainstream desktop software," he says in his blog. "Historically, Microsoft’s standards-spurning Internet Explorer web browser has been viewed as the boat anchor that held back the world wide web, and their Office suite has been notorious for its closed file formats that shifted endlessly according to the whim of Redmond’s developers."

The world has changed now, and such practices are not tolerated he says. Microsoft's promise is pretty much exactly what ODF chair Rob Weir asked for, says Brown.

It will be interesting to see how ODF supporters (as well as the overlapping group of OOXML-bashers) react. My guess is that it will take time to see how serious this support is - but in the meantime, the announcement should help more users decide to use ODF format.