152. De jure document interchange standards have neither the richness nor the product support to be credible interchange standards. (An exception to this is XML, a specific application of SGML, which is considered under a separate class.) Interchange between different OA applications (e.g. between Microsoft Word and Applixware) is generally much more effective where one of the proprietary formats is used rather than where vendor-neutral formats (e.g. RTF) are used.

153. More recently products (such as VMWare) have emerged that allow the Windows operating system to be run in a UNIX environment thus permitting native Windows applications to be hosted. Although this is not a new idea, it is only recently that the products have become sufficiently mature and an acceptable performance achieved. It is, therefore, a practical option for high levels of cross-platform interoperability to be achieved by using the same applications on both Windows and UNIX platforms.