Open File formats

Interesting developments from Microsoft on file formats. T o me there seems to be another large elephant in the room - the fact that the restriction to A) reading and B) "government document" effectively kills any market for a second viable tool to read/write the microsoft format - it would likely not be commercially viable to build such a thing.

It's easy to understand why Microsoft might want to do this - but does it meet the requirement that public documents are truely in an "open" format?