While you are watching the NCAA basketball tournament and wondering if Davidson is going to win again or end their Cinderella story there is another "contest" going on. Actually it is a vote and not maybe not as dramatic as the NCAA tournament but possibly more important. I can tell you that I didn't fare to well in my predictions on basketball (sinking to the bottom of the brakets on ESPN) but if Open Office XML (OOXML) fails to be ratified we might see Microsoft having to change the file formats for the next version of Office. If, on the other hand, it is accepted as a standard that will mean that anyone ca write file viewers and other tools that interoperate with Office. I know that I love using Foxit for reading PDF files. It seems to load faster and it doesn't prompt me to download updates all of the time. I could see others taking the specification and writing viewers for PowerPoint that don't take up as much memory on my machine but that would be 100% compatible so I don't have to worry about fonts or animations not looking correct.

Even more important would be the possiblity of getting a competitor to Word and Excel that includes the "basic" functionality that we all use without some of the fancier or more esoteric features that you don't even know how to use.

Come on and admit it, you really want to know what it would be like to write the next software that will be the "killer app" for the desktop and this gives you a chance to try :)

Read the complete post at http://www.grokdev.com/Blogs/scott/2008/03/29/NCAAAndOOXML.aspx