From Tech News on ZDNet…

Microsoft has pledged to make its new Office 2007 file formats accessible within the company’s other products, but the timeline for that support varies widely.

Although the company already has converters available for older PC versions of Office, the Mac translation tools are still in development. Microsoft now doesn’t expect to have the tools available until late March or April, the company said Tuesday.

“We realize this will be an inconvenience for some of you,” Microsoft acknowledged in its Macmojo blog. Folks in the Mac software unit at Microsoft say they have experienced the pain firsthand, now that a good percentage of Microsoft employees are using Office 2007.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit said in an e-mail on Tuesday that its PocketPC and Smartphone devices won’t be able to read and edit the new formats until the middle of next year….

This won’t stop Microsoft executives dissing OpenOffice for its alleged inability to read MS-formatted documents, though. Monopoly isn’t just a social and economic problem; it’s a state of mind.