I have read a number of blogs posts and articles recently that demonstrate the groundswell of support for the Office Open XML formats. Most impressive in this list of course is support by both Google and IBM (that's right – I said IBM).

Gray Knowlton has a post that demonstrates some of the places that Open XML is popping up on the IBM website (and in their products). It is unclear what the primary driver is for this support but it was not hard to find IBM Customers (and IBM's own "Supportadmin3") agreeing that there is clear customer benefit:

Lotus Symphony Support

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/supportMessage.jspa?messageID=4007&tstart=0

According to Brian Jones it appears that Google is in fact now effectively indexing Open XML files and in fact is also doing HTML translation on them to allow users to view data directly in a browser!