MDI or How would you like your vendor lock-in today?

Some time ago I browsed through the files one of my professors supplied us with for class. There were Powerpoint slides up so we could easily print handouts etc. He also provided us with files which supposedly (I couldn't check the visual layout) are the note shells - just the simple standard layout with tree slides and empty lines next to them. So where was the problem? It was in the Microsoft Document Imaging Format. Not heard of it you say? Well information about it is sparse but if you use Office 2003, it will be a recommended format for scanned images. Great. So what is it?
MDI, mime type image/vnd.ms-modi, is an extensions to TIFF. And that's it. It's proprietary and unless one reverse engineers the file format, one is out of luck. Granted, there is at least one good thing about this binary format, metadata can be encapsulated and in this case it allows me to extract the text from the slides out of the binary. This use case would have been best served by PDF, fine, TIFF or any other documented royalty free image format, if you really want an image format - but with MDI everyone looses.
It is only thanks to the good people at places like Sun that people who do not use Microsoft Office are even able to open Word, Excel and Powerpoint files reliably. All of these formats present the clear and present danger of crippling an information society in the long run. Suppose for a second that via Windows Update Microsoft pushes out a patch that makes all Word and Excel files retroactively no longer readable by any other vendor and that the change cannot be integrated into these other applications. Disclaimer: I'm in no way implying that Microsoft is capable or willing to do this. This is entirely hypothetical!
With these events in place, the (still too slow) rise of the Linux desktop would take a deep plunge. Without adequate exchange options (informing every counterpart to fall back on plain text, RTF or HTML is not only time intensive, it can cost you business) most people simply couldn't switch. And from a campus event we had last week it is clear that the above scenario is of course not realistic but we are again at a point where end-users have to juggle with different versions of Office files, since the students who got a new laptop for the fall semester now all normally have Office 2007 installed by default, but all their other study partners and friends and not to forget staff, often have no way of opening Office 2007 files, unless they install extra tools for it.
Consumer protection is clearly not working in this highly monopolized market and if there was any reason to believe that the internal culture at Microsoft could do any better, there would have been PDF export functionality in Office since Office 2000. Clearly, open standards are the only way out of this dilemma. This is exactly why advocates of Oasis OpenDocument have targeted large entities such as municipalities to weigh in on this discussion to not only make our records more "future" compliant but also encourage competition. This needs to be taken a step further and the US government as well as the European Union should set up rules to make every file format used in future contract work be only an open, royalty-free, documented standard.

In closing I'd like to add two more things that might show that this format is not too much to worry about, anymore. 1) The application to read MDI files is no longer installed by default in Office 2007 2) Searching Google for "mdif" replies: "Did you mean: pdf "