In the early morning hours of May 3, a dramatic piece of news out of Geneva began caroming through the online world: At long last, Microsoft's lock on the $9 billion office-application business was facing a challenge.

The development? An esoteric international standards body had approved a new file standard--called OpenDocument format, or ODF--for saving office documents.

The man who has become a symbol for this movement is Peter Quinn, the mild-mannered former CIO of Massachusetts. Last fall Quinn made it state policy that by January 2007 all state employees would begin saving their work in open-standard formats such as HTML, PDF, and ODF--files that would work on anyone's software, not just Microsoft's.

Quinn touched off a political firestorm.

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