Office Open XML file format now an ECMA standard

This is a good day to all Office users: Microsoft's de-facto standard for business document creation has now an ECMA standard for the company's latest Office 2007 XML based file formats. I've heard that only IBM voted against the approval, but somehow I wasn't surprised. An ISO standard is also in the works.

As for us developers, this means that it will be easier from now on to sell solutions that use Word documents and Excel spreadsheets as a document format/store. And for users, probably we can now stop converting those documents to PDF (or PDF/A) because we were afraid that those documents couldn't be opened in 25 years. The sad thing of course is that you will need to get Office 2007, but after five to ten years from now, probably most everybody (in business, at least) is using the new XML based file formats. Congrats, Office team!