Recent news from Redmond, Washington indicates Microsoft has become a lot more amenable to the idea of supporting industry wide standards and allowing their operating system users to get rid of Internet Explorer in favor of other competing browsers with a new planned control panel setting in Windows 7. With regard to Office the software giant is planning to become more standards compliant.

It is putting in a big effort to make sure it is compliant with documents created for or in OpenOffice and Google Docs. A nice start might be to add the name OpenOffice as a recognizable term to their dictionaries, but let’s not get into that now. The next version of Office will completely support the OpenDocument format as will Office 2007 once the new service pack comes out.

If you are waiting for the next generation of Office (14) to come this year, do not hold your breath too hard as Microsoft indicated it is unlikely, but with the global economy on a downturn, don’t hold your breath that it wouldn’t either. The product to market cycle for most software companies could be increased drastically to entice consumers to part with some cash on perhaps even lower priced products. I assume the fact that a whole lot less consumers have access to credit cards globally now might force the manufacturers to price themselves back into the cash only bracket of the market. This can only be good in my opinion.