Microsoft, ODF, OOXML: We'll help ourselves, thanks

Microsoft will co-operate with some aspects of the demand for open standards. In what way? For instance, consider this business of Microsoft working on an open-source project to develop plug-ins for interoperability between OOXML and ODF. So, now, Word users need not use OpenOffice to open ODF files. And it means that those reluctant to use Office 2007 because it didn't include such support for ODF have had that reason taken away. I suppose there could be others, like it isn't free software for instance, but this one is gone.