[slowpoke]

  And, not to mention no business owner want to get locked
  into a solution, they want their "data" transferable and 
  standardized to at least some extend.

That's a weird thing to say. Why do many business continue to use things like MS Office - or rather, its fabulous file formats then? Or other vendor-lock-in products? Don't misunderstand me, I'd wish all businesses would think like this, because open standards are infinitely superior to vendor-specific file formats. But unfortunately, most don't.

[rch]

Maybe - but nobody uses Front Page, and for good reason. The tools need to reach some critical point of utility and dependability before business will make single-vendor investments.

Still, it absolutely defies reason that a business would need to hire someone specifically to edit a bit of text or change a font on a web site. Once a credible product along these lines hits the market, the terms HTML and CSS will disappear from the overwhelming majority of job descriptions, forever.

[pierreminik]

That's only weird to those who think open standards to be the only viable standard. MS Office is the de facto standard and your data is not vendor-locked when using it. Please provide link to a somewhat decent Word/Excel/... alternative which doesn't at least let you read the document and save it in their own format.

[slowpoke]

  That's only weird to those who think open standards to be
  the only viable standard.

Open standards are the only viable standard if you want adaptable, future-oriented and collaborative software ecosystems as well as likewise markets. You simply cannot guarantee or even create these circumstances with standards that are set by a single corporation (or worse, a trust) - which is only logical because they were designed to do the exact opposite ('defective by design').

  MS Office is the de facto standard

I wasn't arguing that. My point is that this is bad and needs to be replaced.

  your data is not vendor-locked when using it

I think you somewhat misunderstand the term 'vendor-lock'. Sure, you can open Office files with other programs and convert them into open file formats, such as odt.

This is, however, mostly thanks to people reverse engineering Microsoft's original binary file formats, and MS was not really happy about this to begin with. If they could have prevented it, they would have done so (and they tried). Even the newer OOXML is not entirely documented and prevents free implementations due to patents (which, no matter what Microsoft may claim, is the exact opposite of an open standard).

Also, while this conversion might work fine for simple, small documents (or other files), the more complex and larger your filed become the more impossible it becomes to convert without a major hassle, which brings us back to your misunderstanding of 'vendor-lock'. The terms doesn't necessarily mean that it's impossible to switch to alternatives, but also applies when measures are taken to make it as hard as possible to switch without investing heavily in time and money.

As a side note, I am not attacking MS Office specifically. It's just the best example for showing all that is wrong with closed standards and proprietary file formats.

[pierreminik]

I'm not preaching morals, I'm taking business. Business' care not for fair software but their investment which is why I used the "somewhat open standard"-wording.

In the history you're clinging to you completely ignore that there was no real alternative. Open standards weren't in a viable state. Furthermore the competition from closed standards have forced open standards to shape up.

[chadgeidel]

Completely off-topic, but - like it or not - business runs on Excel. I certainly don't because I have to deal with it on a day to day basis. There's simply no convincing them to move to another format. Excel is the defacto "move numbers and data around" file format in the organization I work for.