Hi recently I had a conversation with a fellow developer and talk about ODF popularity. The debate centralized between the Open source agenda and the open standard agenda and where it cross.

The idea of empowering ODF across technologies and systems can sometimes be challenging to absorbed by open source people (including myself). 

So an interesting challenging was brought up. Why not have an ODF Viewer in microsoft technology. This means VB and ActiveX. This will be as tactical as having a ODF plugin for Microsoft office.

Having a website that automagically install a IE-based (win32) plugin that naturally reads ODF on the web and are viewable by the browser could be a development that even thought is not glamurous could represent a big adoption strategy and the use of Open standards will be met. 

Having VB source code available could also bring VB developers to code on ODF. I would like to know your thougts around this matter.

I guess the language doesn't matter and some might even think that this is doable using python with win32 or even in Visual C++ or C#. However the challenge is on.