Read today something very interesting related to the office format wars. As it appears Sun does not care too much if ODF is going to be the winner of the format wars. The Open Document Foundation is talking now about a new format called CDF which has better chances to be inter operable with the Microsoft format. Do not know which of the 3 formats is better from technical point of view, but it seems that ODF (the format) is loosing traction.

Also another thing that I heard recently (a podcast from The Register) was the discontent that Mark Shuttleworth has regarding the OpenOffice as a whole. He is not happy that it take 9 hours to compile the source code (for that matter I think nobody is happy about it) and he says that if the guys at openoffice.org do not move the software in the right direction he (Ubuntu guys) will take matter in his own (their) hands.

Probably is the time for some sort of rewrite of the suite. The big problem is who is going to pay for this. I wonder if IBM will somehow take over from Sun and develop Lotus Symphony into the new open source office suite. And also I wonder if Mark is thinking to switch Ubuntu to Lotus Symphony or something based on it.