Massachusetts and MS Office

The home of MIT has some more problems for Microsoft. Just recently, Massachusetts government proposed a plan to use OpenDocument format (open source and based on XML) for all official purposes. I don't know about Microsoft, but this is a very good step towards standardization of not only applications but also data. If we can have a standard for web pages (HTML and XHTML), why not for all the other formats too. I believe this is would also be helpful in the process of standardization and independance of services online as well.