Big news from Redmond - Microsoft changing Office default file formats to be open and XML based

This news has been bubbling from all over the blogosphere today.

Here's some links to blogs that have been talking about this:

http://rcd.typepad.com/rcd/2005/06/microsoft_offic.html

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/06/01.html#a10287

http://chrisgonyea.com/archives/2005/06/02/office-12-to-have-new-file-format/

http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2005/06/01/new-default-xml-formats-for-ms-office/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBott-WindowsandOfficeExpertise?m=333

http://office.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000753045334/

http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2005/06/office_xml_ii.html

http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/06/02/new-office-formats-will-be-open-xml/

http://feeds.feedburner.com/EdBott-WindowsandOfficeExpertise?m=331

http://feeds.feedburner.com/HouseOfTheHangedManRSS2?m=174

This probably won't be much more than a cause of pain for consumer users of Office, but I'm thinking that this will be a good thing for corporate users.

A lot of the pain that we currently have with documents is using WordPerfect docs with Word and vice versa. If both applications switch to a more open file type like what Microsoft is supposed to be doing, it will be a very good thing indeed for users who either do not use Office at all or who use Office and another similar suite interchangeably.