Many feathers have been ruffled regarding the State of Massachusetts backing the OpenDocument standard, demanding it as the primary document archival and working standard in the near future. This is, of course, in direct opposition to Microsoft's plans with their Office XML format, a relatively open and transparent interchange format that they banked much of their hopes for Office 12 upon. Turns out that some took issue with the fact that, while otherwise it is gratis and open, Microsoft's licence basically limits GPLd applications from joining the Office XML game (not explicitly, but rather simply through an incompatibility. It isn't as insidious as it sounds).

While it might not seem like that big of a deal that one relatively small state dictated such a change, these sorts of things are almost always contagious - it is extremely likely that many other governments and levels of government will follow suit. Microsoft will almost certainly have to support OpenDocument, or will have to completely unencumber Office XML (they're 99% there, though many say even that will be too little, too late). We've already seen Microsoft surprizingly include PDF output functionality (though that's not enough to satisfy the State of Massachusetts), so it doesn't seem like much of a reach for Microsoft to capitulate and add OpenDocument functionality (it's probably largely just a document mapping/transformation type problem).

Nonetheless, one comment on a message board had me reminiscing about where .DOC once was, and where it is today. The writer in question, to paraphrase, opined that one would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face if they were to relinquish their ability to deal with Office files. "How would they communicate with other people and organizations?" they asked. Without the Office formats as the lingua franca, the implication was, they would be lost in a sea of unreadable files!

If someone said that to me six years ago, I would have certainly agreed: every document - from resumes to financial statements to installation instructions to inter-organizational communications - were .doc files. It was the ubiquitous document format. Compare that to today: Now the vast majority of resumes are transmitted as plain-text, html, or by using some ardous online resume builder (which behind the scenes is being stored in some proprietary format, or perhaps hr-xml). Financial statements, and virtually all layout specific documents are relayed as PDFs. Many other communications occur in rich-text or HTML email. In most of the places you would once find a .DOC file, you now find something in its place. Of course those are documents meant to be consumed, and at the source Microsoft Word most likely played a part, but the fact remains that Word becomes irrelevant once the document is transformed into one of these consumable document formats. The network effect lock-in is largely a thing of the past.

If I had to pick a turning point - the moment when .doc jumped the shark - it would have to be the Melissa virus. Suddenly innocuous document layout files that could be easily viewed and printed became a vector of contamination, with caveats and disclaimers about their handling. At that time I was doing software development at an engineering shop, and worked with HR in vetting resumes. It was shortly thereafter that we started investigating alternatives to people emailing us Word files, and we certainly weren't alone.

Of course Excel remains a critical document format, and if you share numbers in the industry it's likely that you see an .XLS file along the way.