Microsoft support for ODF points to struggle with OOXML

Microsoft shocked market analysts by recently announcing that they would soon start supporting the open source format ODF in their MS Office productivity suite.

This is a surprising announcement coming from Microsoft as they have been promoting their own OOXML format since quite some time.

The format has been facing criticism from a lot of quarters and the company continues to work on improving it.

They currently support very little of it in their latest editions of the MS Office suite. Complete support is not expected till the next version of MS Office.

ODF on the other hand is supported by almost every rival product in the market including OpenOffice.

The company needs to provide this support to make MS Office lucrative to governments and educational institutes who prefer standardized document formats.

This is also going to benefit people using the alternative suites as they would be able to share files in a better file format with their friends and relatives.