Industry debate about the relative merits of OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Ecma 376 Office Open XML (OOXML) highlights the significance of the productivity application market shift from binary and proprietary file formats to vendor- and product-independent Extensible Markup Language (XML) models. The competitive stakes are huge, and the related political posturing is sometimes perplexing.

In this overview, Research Directors Guy Creese and Peter O’Kelly introduce ODF, OOXML, and related World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, and project their implications for future productivity applications.