OpenOffice 2.0 will likely put a hurt on Microsoft 13317

Which requires yet another change. Is it your position that Sun Microsystems (ala - Star Office) is less "destination unknown" than Microsoft? It's plausible that Sun may not even exist in another year or two. Hardly comforting to someone thinking of standardizing on Star Office.

My guess is that they are use to defining the standards and don't want that to change.

Importing WP files works on both OO and MSO. How does this give any additional freedom if you import it through OO?

Re-read your post and my response. Text that is "raw ASCII, flush left, etc." is compatible with most MS-Products and certainly with MS-Word. Your original point was that OO gives "Freedom to deal with non-Microsoft-using customers." A manuscript that is formatted as plain ASCII text is no more difficult to deal with using MS products or OO. Where's the extra freedom coming from when opening ASCII files with OO?

I'm sure that it has happened before. With 10's of millions of users it is bound to happen. Do you really think that OO will never crash or corrupt a document?

I don't use Word2003 so I can't say for sure. Using Google I found a few sample XML docs from Word-2003. I didn't see any binary data in there but that's not to say there can't be. Can you show any evidence that Word-2003 files are in a binary-like format?

Remember that XML doesn't allow binary data in a document. Even a "CDATA" section must be encoded in something like base64 if it contains binary data. So I don't know where this "binary data" thing is coming from.