So according to an InfoWorld article,
…legislators in Massachusetts, which in 2005 first required that all agencies would be forced to store public documents in non-proprietary formats like HTML or PDF, admitted in the discussion that they have not yet been able to provide tangible evidence that moving to an ODF system would deliver the financial savings some backers of the movement envision.
So one single state decides to change from a file format and suddenly faces the full might of the Microsoft marketing machine. There are intrinsic benefits to using an open format that accrue over the lifetime of a document, but the costs in the initial phase of changeover (the case in any transition) will outweigh the benefits. It would be doubly difficult of Massachusetts to account for its costs given the huge legal battle it has fought to date.
Its like looking into a startup six months after it hits the start line and saying, “why aren’t you profitable?”
Copacetic 