@Greg Fleming

and so the vicious circle begins.

'Everyone' has to have a copy of M$s latest offering because they need to open documents that office staff who have just managed to pass their ECDL created.

So M$ use the fact that 'everyone' is already using this document format as a reason for it to be standardised.

Come later next year, or whenever M$ fancy rewriting a small section of office which somehow makes it run 5x slower, yet adding no new functionality they make every office across the world shell out for a new copy - and why? Because otherwise they won't be able to read their precious 'standardised' documents into which, no doubt, they'll have imported several proprietary namespaces that OO and other competitors won't be able to handle.

The flame because that's the treatment *.doc attachments get!