Betwixt and between ODF, OO-XML, and Google, Corel discusses Wordperfect roadmap

.: Acorn Networks :. Until very recently, if you or your company wanted to buy a "productivity suite" — a package of software that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, Powerpoint-like presentations, and a few other helpful utilities — there were relatively few choices and none of them played well together. In other words, while you may have been able to open documents that were saved in one suite using another suite, that "interoperability" was never quite perfect. Not only that, the vendors who made these suites have had a limited amount of incentive to fix the problem. When you're a vendor, interoperability is often a bad thing. It gives end users what the deserve. The power to switch.
If you're a vendor and you can addict your customers to your proprietary (vendor-specific) formats, that's a good thing. The more documents your customers create in with your suite of software, the more addicted to that software your customers will become — eventually relying on it to the exclusion of everything else to create, open, save, or edit their documents.
But then, in 2005, if you were a user of such suites, the productivity suite interoperability landscape took a turn for the better when a group of vendors including IBM and Sun got together to create a common way for saving and retrieving documents known as the OpenDocument Format or ODF. Although ODF has risen in status to an international standard, having recently been ratified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), there is one small wrinkle: Microsoft, the maker of the most popular suite — Microsoft Office — has so far shown limited interes in getting its productivity suite to work with ODF. Instead (still more good news for end users), in the name of the same interoperability that ODF was created for, Microsoft has released a different "open" format known as the Office Open XML format or OO-XML and it too is headed to the ISO for ratification (although no one can say for sure whether or not it will get it). Say what you will about Microsoft coming out with an additional standard rather than just supporting ODF, the bottom line is that the world is better off with open formats rather than the closed ones that existed just a year or two ago.