Hi,
On http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050831202118904 there is news that the government of Massachusetts is proposing using the OASIS Open Document file formats as standards. I.e. government business will be conducted in these formats (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.) and any one who wants to conduct business with the MA government needs to do so in these formats.
At present, these formats are supported by OpenOffice.org (natively for 2.0 and for import only with 1.1.5), StarOffice, KOffice and IBM's Workplace.
The history is that a request for comment was aired earlier in the year and the proposed formats to standardise on were to be both OASIS' formats and Microsoft's XML formats. However, the commentary they received seems to have been overwhelming in highlighting that the latter was not really an open format. As a result, it has been dropped from the proposal. This is a proposal, however.
This is a good thing for us, as there are many Free Software applications that either support or plan to support these formats and because it will force the market leader to reconsider its position of not supporting the formats in their desire to prevent other applications interoperating well with theirs. In short, if Microsoft wants to sell its Office applications to the state government of Massachusetts, it'll have to support the OASIS formats. In the meantime, the user base (and exposure) for the Free Software alternatives is likely to increase.
Éibhear.