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If that is the way you feel, why wouldn't you use OpenOffice instead of MS Office? Seems to me that would make more sense than using that "ms office crap"

wtf are you talking about? i use open office, i never touched ms office

Yeah... Now all we need is for Microsoft to follow suit by releasing OpenXML filters for OpenOffice. Heck, as long as they're open source, I'm sure the KDE and GNOME guys wouldn't mind porting them to KOffice and "GNOME Office" (as if the latter really exists anymore).

It boggles my mind that this format can be an ECMA (and ISO now?) standard without an open reference implementation. We all know that MS is one of those corporations that simply doesn't care about what anyone else thinks, so it's not like we can do or say anything to expedite this process.

There's a saying that if the entire population of China jumped from a 1-meter height at the same time, it would create a tidal wave that would swamp the entire US. However, this is actually 8 orders of magnitude short of the energy released in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. If the entire population of China jumped at the same time in protest of Microsoft's document formats, they wouldn't feel a thing in Redmond.

It boggles my mind that this format can be an ECMA (and ISO now?) standard without an open reference implementation.

The problem isn't that there isn't an open reference implementation, the problem is that the proposed standard contains references to old extinct Microsoft products. E.g. it says things like "handle line breaks like MS Office version x". If you no longer can get hold of that version of office how are you supposed to make an implementation of your own, or test that your implementation actually follows the standard.

BTW, as far as I know OpenXML hasn't been approved as ISO standard yet and many principal standards bodies have filed contradictions.