Maybe they're not all bad after all

Or at least they're getting better, Microsoft that is. According to a recent announcement on their website they're finally releasing documentation for their horrid binary file formats. The ones used up until 2007 at least.

This is a good thing, a very good thing even. Granted that the documentation is accurate this means it'll get easier for developers to interoperate with Microsoft's proprietary technologies and that's great since they have such a huge percentage of the market when it comes to wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentation software (i.e. Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Good news for data portability in other words and maybe now the OpenOffice-team won't have to reverse engineer stuff until they're blue in the face to make Microsoft Office documents work flawlessly within their own applications.

I'm calling this a good day for interoperability and open development.