As expected, Massachusetts sticks with Microsoft Office
WinInfo | at | by Mike
For all its juking and jiving, Massachusetts will, of course, stick with Microsoft Office and eschew the free OpenOffice.org office suite it had threatened Microsoft with. However, the state said that it will use the open-source OpenDocument data format in lieu of Microsoft's proprietary data formats. It can do so because Microsoft will soon ship an OpenDocument plug-in for Microsoft Office that lets the suite read and write to OpenDocument files. In tech terms, this is a win-win: Microsoft gets the revenue from selling Office to Massachusetts, and Massachusetts can claim a moral victory by using an open-source document format. Frankly, the whole thing was ridiculous. And if Massachusetts was really concerned about doing the right thing, it would simply utilize Microsoft's Open XML formats, which work natively in Office 2007.