Quite a bit of talk has arisen today over two of Microsoft's competitors (Google and IBM) offering free office suites in an attempt to supplant Microsoft as the office king. And now that this is happened, some are wondering if Microsoft will finally face reality and offer its own Office product for free so it can compete.

Now that the ISO standards committee has gotten hold of the Microsoft Open Office XML standard, after the vote giving it ISO status, one of the O’s is no longer needed, or wanted, as the Office moniker gets dropped.

Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution.

Microsoft Office possibly scares users who try to open ODF in Microsoft Office.

Like it or not, one of the most important features of any Microsoft Office alternative is being able to read Microsoft Office files.

Compatibility issues even between Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 (Mac OS X).

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office allows users of Microsoft Office to read, edit and save to the Open Document Format (ODF).

Microsoft declared yesterday (May 21st, 2008) that Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 would include (among others such as PDF 1.5, PDF/A and some more) built-in support for OASIS OpenDocument Format version 1.1 (finalized, submitted to ISO, supported by OpenOffice.org, Kofffice, GNOME office apps and their forks) while ISO-submitted OOXML support would wait for Office 14.
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How does the current version of OpenOffice.org (OOo) compare with Microsoft Office in its ability to produce slide presentations?