An openly documented office file format is a step in the right direction.
But I think the bigger problem with MS Office is that the file format itself is horrid. From what I can gather, it's a cross between a raw object dump and a virtual memory cache.
This would explain why even MS Office can't reliably read its own documents, and why reverse engineering has been so slow and difficult.
In Microsoft Word 2.0, if you were editing a file on a floppy disk, and you swapped the floppy for another one (e.g. to copy text out of another file) without closing Word, then Word crashed and your doc file was trashed. I reckon the reason the file was trashed is that Word was using it as a swap file.
The same bug exists in Word 2002, released 10 years later. It happened to me when a network drive disconnected.
The fact that so many people rely on such a fragile file format is holding a lot of things back. How can anyone build on shifting sand? The sooner its replaced with something decent the better.
Imagine if digital cameras all used a closed image file format. A lossy format like JPEG, except that instead of discarding details humans don't notice, the format loses information that humans really care about. And instead of compressing data, it expands it.
I think a lot fewer people would enjoy using digital cameras if they worked that way.
Of course the file format is only the tip of the iceberg. There are substantial features in Word that are so broken that users quickly learn it's not worth using them. Other features are so unpredictable that they effectively discourage editing and experimentation. Expert users subconciously avoid features that cause problems.
I reckon the overall productive uptime with Word is about 90% - 95%, depending on the job at hand and the user. That's not too bad until you multiply 5% downtime by several hundred million daily users.
The quandry is that people won't be motivated to switch until something comes along that is both compatible and yet significantly improved. It's hard to be compatible with a dodgy file format, and projects like OpenOffice.org seem to be more of the same but open. It reminds me of the ponderous Mozilla browser. Mozilla and OOo are excellent projects, but what's needed is something like Firefox that strips off the barnacles, is open source so people can build on it, works roughly the way that people are used to, and yet simpler, faster and more reliable.
There are 5 billion literate people in the world. Isn't it time we had a writing tool that doesn't suck?
