This announcement almost went unnoticed : since last week the Oasis consortium finalized the specification of the Open Document Format for Office Applications, aka OpenDocument
Office Applications like Microsoft Office, Open Office (and its commercial derivative StarOffice), iWork, KOffice will now have a common open standard as file format.
The Oasis-approved OpenDocument file format is a derivative of the OpenOffice 1.0 XML and ZIP based file format and is already available in pre-release versions of Open Office 2.0 and Star Office 8.0
Now it will be interesting to watch what the industry leader will propose in the next versions of its Office suite.