Massachusetts's decision to drop the Microsoft Office proprietary formats could become a turning point for the Redmond company.

The Open Source-Microsoft confrontation is not something new, but so far, the followers of the concept that software should be free have only scored some victories on the emergent and some European markets. This whole situation could worsen for Microsoft should other states decide to follow Massachusetts's example.

What could Microsoft do in these circumstances? Release a patch or an update to introduce the Open Office and PDF formats among those recognized by the MS Office application? Or to ignore the problem?

So far, Microsoft has kept saying that under no circumstances will the Open Office format be supported by MS Office, the company promising that once version 12 is released, and together with it, the XML format, everything will become interoperable.

For Open Office, even if Massachusetts officials will change their minds, this is one of the biggest victories. Only the fact that the American state has thought about this is an important success for Open Office.


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