Why is ODF a leapfrog? While it doesn't appear to be so, it offers something MS Office is never going to be able to offer, full portability of documents regardless of program. I call that a killer feature.
I think that you're forgetting other "open" specs like RTF, which offer full portability of documents regardless of the program used to edit or render them. And you also forget that the other MS Office formats are pretty well-understood these days by a *lot* of other programs. To say that you don't have something close to full portability of your documents today is to live in igorance. To say that we don't have "simply documents" these days is to abound in ignorance.
ODT does have a few things that the MSFT formats don't have:
- A standards body around the format
- Buzzword compliance
- Ignorant zealots (aren't they all?)
- Momentum
From a technical perspective, ODT, DOC/XLS, etc. are on fairly equal playing ground and enjoy broad application support. Why I have to claim otherwise in order to "be there socially", as you claim, I have no idea. Your excluding/ignoring/rejecting other people's well-founded technical opinions because they aren't they aren't your type of zealotry is an inexcusable offense.
I'm not claiming that ODT isn't technically good or morally good. It is both. I'd rather support it than MSFT's formats any day. But you're arguing all the wrong things for all the right reasons.