Steven Garrity has a 3 parts article about open formats and that catch-22 situation:

Really interesting reading if you ask yourself some questions about Ogg, Jabber or why one shouldn't use MS Office formats.

Update: dom has posted corrections of the office formats article (Part 3). I agree with his corrections, in fact I knew about them, I just thought that the original article with presenting things good enough. So for accuracy, I also link to dom's.