After Mr. Gates has announced his imminent retirement, Microsoft announced its Open Document Format Open Source project.  This project converts the Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML format to Open Document Format.  While Microsoft traditionally is opposed to make its bread-and-butter office product more open, this is a step in the right direction.  This is something that Microsoft hasn’t previously done. 

Disclaimer:  Microsoft and the Open Source team has not mentioned how much of the MS Office 2007 feature set will be supported in the Open Document convertor.