I'm going to go off-topic here - just make sure you read down to the end where I express my flipside view too.
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I've been in the tech business almost since the dawn of Microsoft, and it's interesting that so much anti-Microsoft sentiment is still out there.
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Quite a few of us have been around since the dawn and a tad before it. I don't consider it surprising at all that there's a lot of anti-MS sentiment, particularly from people in our position.
It is perhaps ironic that Microsoft's success is in part because they themselves rode on the back of the collective efforts in the hardware industry to break apart IBM's propriatory BIOS. As we know, back then IBM was the 1000lb gorilla pushing everyone around. It is on the strength of open standards and compatibility that Microsoft was able to spread so well amongst the business community (that said, I believe Bill Gates would have made a success of anything - he is just that good at business).
Microsoft by law, has one goal, satisfy the share holders. Shareholders will punish them harder than any court of law at this point. With that in mind it's entirely understandable that Microsoft has and will continue to ensure that their software will be as difficult to be compatible with as possible. There is no open written standard that you can obtain which will let you write a clean-room library that will read and write ms-doc files as good (or bad) as MS-Office does.
Microsoft is very smart, they know business very well, they will do their utmost to ensure that they stay in the game, as does any other self respecting capitalistic business. Good will, sharing, standards and cooperation are only faces worn in order to gain extra market share, either short or long term, this is business.
Imagine life without HTML, JPEG, PNG, MP3*/OGG, H.264*/WebM, PDF*.
A lot of people honestly wouldn't be "anti-MS" if Microsoft didn't have a lovely 20yr+ history of sabotage, lock-in, embrace-extend-extinguish or many other behaviours they seem to be known for.
Most of the time when Microsoft comes to supporting a standard format it's because they've either lost the race or they're planning to subtly 'enhance' it and ruin the compatibility.
If you could buy MS Office and know that you could use/share those files amongst other people without them requiring the exact same MS Office version to read it then I'm sure many people wouldn't have a problem at all (at least now PDF export does that job well enough, so long as you don't need to edit it in most cases).
On the other side of the coin - Microsoft has no obligation to open anything what so ever to anyone, it's their software, you choose to use it under their terms. There's nothing in law stating that they have to play nice. While we might enjoy the dream of them considering their ethical or moral responsibilities the truth is that they have none when it comes to sharing. Microsoft is allowed to create their own ecosystem and put walls up all around. They owe the community nothing.
There are plenty of documented, open and available standards for everyone to choose from which do work on Microsoft systems; however it is up to us to use these.
(*These are proprietary standards but they are fully documented and hence can be implemented by 3rd parties)