Microsoft seems to be stacking the deck in standards organizations in favor of OfficeOpen XML, starting in Sweden. 23 mostly minor Microsoft affiliated companies joined the Swedish Standards Institute at the last minute and 22 of them voted in favor of OfficeOpen standardization. I only wonder why this didn't happen sooner or why it doesn't happen more often. I guess most companies just don't care all that much about standards most of the time. Microosft usually just ignores standards it doesn't like or doesn't understand (consider CSS and HTML); but this one may actually affect them in the pocketbook since governments are starting to require open formats before signing purchase contracts.
Planamesa Software has released NeoOffice/J 2.2.1, a Mac port of OpenOffice 2.1 using a Java-based GUI. This release his release adds support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and can now open and save Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files (though likely with a few glitches).
