Apparently the new Office file format will be an open XML standard.

Sounds good, but I’m not quite sure where it leaves the Open Document standard, which as I understand it is the same, only different.

Take two open, universal document standards into the shower?

I’m not sure how extensible either of these formats is, but if we can standardise on one of them, and if it allows some way to embed new content types into the document, then we might end up getting back to something like OpenDoc by the back door. Obviously OpenDoc was a lot more than a document format, but having a standard for that is certainly a good start…