Office to Become Fully Open XML Compliant (at last)

Yesterday - after only 7 years - Microsoft announced that its next version of Office will fully implement a standard that the vendor spent three years battling to get the world to adopt.

The unobtrusive announcement brings a degree of closure to a seven year long epic battle between some of the largest technology companies in the world.  The same saga pitted open source advocates against proprietary vendors, and for the first time brought the importance of technical standards to the attention of millions of people around the world, and at the center of the action were Microsoft and IBM, the latter supported by Google and Oracle, among other allies. 

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