Weird Microsoft news: The bane of third party office suites has been Microsoft's closed file formats that prevent proper reading of Office documents. The next version of Office will use publicly disclosed XML file formats, which should be great news for third party apps, except that they've also patented various methods of writing to XML files, presumably to control third party access. It'll be interesting to see where this leads. I've always said that Apple's last bit of dependence on Microsoft is Office. I wonder if there will ever once again be real competitors to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I miss the days of WordPerfect, Nisus, and WingZ. It'll be tough, though, because I know I eventually switched to the MS apps because they really did have better feature sets.