[xorcist]

That's not really the complete picture. People want to use the Google standards you mention because they solve a real problem and is proved in production. What problem does Office Open XML solve, apart from not being Open Document XML? You use it because of external factors, not because it is an elegant solution to a problem.

[pfranz]

I think Open Document XML solves a problem--it's just not an immediate problem. It won't make saving and emailing around a document easier, but it will make interoperability (I'm talking even between two versions of Word--not just between word processors) simpler. Even if it's not supported you have some recourse for extracting data. Tragedy of the commons.

Google has an advantage because there's an obvious win over the old standard and they offer a big enough buy-in. GIF, for example, is generally better served by PNG. But adoption has been slow because the benefits aren't good enough and wide support took awhile to get implemented.

[chc]

GIF this days is almost always used as a moving-picture format, which is not something standard PNG does. The number of actual GIFs being passed around these days that would be better off as PNGs is virtually zero.

[pfranz]

That's kind of my point. Animated pngs support 24bit color and transparency--which gifs do not. The carrot of transparency and more colors weren't enough to replace gif. It looked like the lzw patent scare would be enough but since that expired in 2003 nobody has been motivated to fully implement the spec or create content exclusively as pngs

[chc]

AFAIK the PNG format does not provide for animation. You'd need to use another format such as MNG or APNG. Am I mistaken?