The push behind Microsoft's Office moves

Rob Helm, an analyst for researcher Directions on Microsoft, said software publisher Adobe Systems may be seen as a more significant long-term threat by Microsoft. Adobe's push for businesses to broadly use its Portable Document Format to store and exchange business data could undercut the value of Office applications.

"Microsoft is fighting to keep Office as the standard archival format for documents...and Adobe has begun to give Office a little bit of a scare on that front," he said. "If companies were to standardise on PDF, Office would become just one PDF authoring tool among many. It's a very long-term potential threat, but Microsoft can afford to look several steps ahead."

Open XML support in Office helps counter any PDF threat by allowing free interchange of data between Office documents and back-end systems and by encouraging customers and partners to build services around Office, Helm said.

"Anything they can do to make Office a better archival format helps in that regard," he said. With the schemas, "you can feed Office documents into XML content management systems or use XML tools to categorise and scan documents."

Helm sees Microsoft's overall enthusiasm for XML as genuine and part of a wide industry trend toward supporting the standard.

"XML is one area where Microsoft hasn't had to be pushed," he said "They realise that if XML takes off, it expands the market for their products so much, it'll outweigh any possible competitive disadvantages."

Microsoft has been instrumental in establishing XML as a Web standard, and, along with IBM, has been a vocal supporter of XML for Web services application development.

"All of the vendors see more money for themselves if XML takes off. [XML] makes it easier to interconnect systems," Helm said. "That's more important to them than gaining any proprietary advantage, at this point."