Off topic again, sorry... but when I'm not playing with Poser... or gardening, I spend a lot of time programming solutions based on Microsoft technologies... in Visual Studio. 

Microsoft Word is perhaps one of the most widely used productivity apps on the planet and has established some document file formats that are generally pretty well supported in other apps...

...e.g. Open Office can open .doc format etc.

However, even at their scale and with the product coverage that MS Office has, Microsoft have still realised there is a need for them to provide plenty of extensibility and interoperability support; e.g. Word can save as Rich Text Format or as PDF, and as a variety of other, more open, or just alternative, formats.

That really helps with my word processing workflow and document exchange issues ;-)

Plus the SDK, interop classes and developer support for MS Office... not to mention product documentation... could be said to set a standard that all other commercial software producers should really strive, hard, to emulate...