@Don Mitchell

Oh, on top of everything else, in the original post where you quote:

"...the only acceptable modifiction is to delete *everything* thats MS-inspired"

The full quote is:

"Will somebody please tell them that the only acceptable modifiction is to delete *everything* thats MS-inspired in its entirety, and replace it lock stock and barrel by the existing Open-Office based standard."

Making it clear that this is only in reference to the proposed ISO standard, not any actual software packages. He may feel that way about Microsoft in general, but that's not what he said here, and given the scope of this conversation, we shouldn't assume he's talking about more than the document format unless he says he is. In addition, from a purely technical perspective, I half agree. Microsoft's proposal is so bad that I suspect it was on purpose, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the entire proposed "standard" should be binned. I wouldn't personally suggest that Microsoft's only option be to adopt ODF (though I do think it would a good idea), they would be doing everyone - including their own internal developers - a huge favour if they would either pick an existing standard such as ODF, or design a properly interoperable format from the ground up.