In an interview with Ars Technica, Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, reveals that he believes that Microsoft’s OOXML format will die off, regardless of the outcome of the ISO appeals process.
He is convinced that the industry will regard OOXML as a dead end, and that will force Microsoft to accept ODF. We have already seen some evidence of this in Microsoft’s recent decision to support ODF in Office—a change of heart that was precipitated by pressure from ODF adopters. Sutor suspects that this trend will continue and that Microsoft will eventually fully embrace ODF.
A couple hours ago Microsoft announced that Office 2007 will support ODF 1.1. While this is good news on it’s own, what’s more remarkable is that it is unlikely that Office 2007 will support OOXML (or rather [ISO/IEC 29500]), the standard Microsoft bought for itself.