Randall C. Kennedy of InfoWorld writes: ...So it was with an eye toward the all-important requirement of seamless interoperability that I evaluated the latest and greatest that the competition has to offer. In the following sections, I take a look at OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker 2008 to determine if these suites have what it takes to stage the ultimate palace coup and bring down the king once and for all. I also explore the recently leaked Microsoft Office 2010 Community Technical Preview (CTP) build and explain why I believe that the company's flagship productivity offering is so hard to kill. (Hint: It's the ecosystem, stupid.)

Finally, I've put together a rogue's gallery of interoperability blunders that I documented during lab testing. Some of these examples you need to see in order to believe. And for the truly curious, I've provided a link to the Word 2003 "torture test" document used to expose the current state of third-party Microsoft file format compatibility...