There has been a very positive reaction to our open formats, although there's still perception from some quarters that we're the enemy of open source. That's just not the case.
We've shipped a version of Office 2003 with an open format and we've expressed more commitment to the approach in our next Office releases. We feel that we're not being given enough of an opportunity to explain how openness is possible.
Open Office is fine if you have very limited needs because it was really designed around what Microsoft Office products were designed around 10 years ago.
Openness is very important for us, and for our customers. There's more awareness, but as the situation in Massachusetts demonstrates, we still have more work to do in terms of emphasizing our work with open formats.
We would have liked a greater opportunity to explain how openness is possible with Office. We've found a very positive reaction to our open formats and our approach, and there's a growing awareness there.
The ODF Alliance (Sun, IBM and their friends) apparently want to push ODF as an 'exclusive' standard to the detriment of all others vs. enabling choice among formats such as PDF from Adobe, Open XML, HTML and others.