Massachusetts officials think of migrating toward Open Office and PDF formats.

And that's not good news for Microsoft, which keeps on evading the subject and praise the virtues of the unborn Open XML format. This is the next MS Office 12 standard and should come out sometime in 2006.
Brian Jones, Program Manager for MS Office 12, states in his blog that the decision of the State of Massachussetts case on migrating towards another Open Source format it's definitely ahead of its time and they should just wait at least until the new format comes out.

Brian Jones underlines the fact that the new format would come free of charge for anybody who plans to develop applications for this type of folders.

In another words, why shouldn't Open Office just adapt to the Open XML and get it over with, rather than force Microsoft into taking the decision of including the function of compatibility with Office Open Source series generated folders?

The problem is that nobody knows, for now at least, just how is the new format, Open XML, going to work, and it is kind of odd to ask the Massachusetts guys to stick around for another year, if we come to think that everybody wants a decision to be made by the end of the week!

Anyway, the single thing stated clearly in Jones' blog is that Open XML format would allow any type of MS documents, no matter of the version, to be read by a new range of applications, but it states nothing on other applications, such as Adobe Acrobat or even Open Office.