Governments have duties and rules to follow about biddings, contracts, etc that privates haven't.
And another thing, about open document formats: governments produce documents that must remain accessible for decennia, even for centuries and independently from the survival of the company that produced the SW used to produce said documents and they must remain accessible even if SW suppliers change, and about this, goverments have the duty towards their citizens, that pay all the expenses, to avoid possible unpredicted costs that could arise if closed format documents must eventually be recovered and converted.
The use of formats documented, free to use and open are of the essence for the aforementioned reasons.
This said, a proprietary SW using open formats should be fine, if chosen with a regular procedure for its price and desired features, but MS SW has a bad record about formats, and even its last "open" effort, OOXML, is a bloody mess compared to ODF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Criticism_of_ECMA-376_1st_edition

Your post amuses me so I will address it.

The statement of "make it" shows ignorance.  The cost of building an enterprise class application is non-negligible and mimicking the feature set of an existing application which has seen years of development itself is a long and time-consuming process.  In many cases, the time and cost constraints make it simply unfeasable to create an alterative to an existing technology.  Comparatively, you have pre-packaged software which will handle your business requirements, you can begin using very shortly after purchase, and usually has full support from its creators.  This is why most every agency and business will prefer packaged software over the more expensive of option of developing it themselves. 

The next statement of ignorance is your use of "Microsoft certified tech."  Did you know that Microsoft offers well over 50 certifications ranging from a meager Office certification to a MSSQL server certification?  You seem to be under the impression that having a single certification should magically make an individual capable in every area under the sun.  I am telling you that this is not how it works nor should it be how you expect it to work in company with as many products as Microsoft.  You should take more time to educate yourself before you make fun of others.

Microsoft was in no way responsible for the Y2K bug, and technically it wasn't a bug to begin with. The bug was a coding shortcut used by everybody to save space within system cache which was extremely limited. Once again everyone did this. Laying the blame on any one party is asinine.

Further more the problem was blown way out of proportion. The majority of the cost was in testing, and upgrading systems. Which lets be brutally honest needed to be upgraded anyway. The vast majority of computers or users had absolutely nothing to worry about, because they were not using computers that were over ten years old at the time.

I am honestly not very sorry for someone who bitched and moaned about having to replace a fifteen year old computer. They were going to have to replace it soon enough anyway. For no other reason then they couldn't even buy replacement parts for it anymore.

I'm not blaming Microsoft, but it was only Windows that suffered from this. Unix systems did not, and they have their own Y2K-like bug in 2038. Since the world runs on a single system they are all hit by these bugs at once. With diversity, individual bugs don't have as much impact. This is independent of how preventable the glitch was; they WILL happen and in that case we need lots of independently designed systems (not better; just different) to withstand it.

Do you see what I mean?

^^
But luckily John Titor came from the future and went back to it to solve the 2037 bug!!!
I wonder why he didn't prevent WWIII and the next American Civil War too, though.







...Jokes apart, widespread adoption of more recently developed 64bit Unixes and Unix-like OS' should have really solved, or to say it better, prevented the problem almost everywhere.

ahaha even the zune 80gb had a Y2k bug last year.

it crashed on day 366. a patch was issued, u you have to wait til january 01
microsoft can't do something no bugged even if their live depend on it :P.

So if some of the other options like Linux are free, then how do they make money?

Support contracts, which can cost more than MS....   but are optional.

and training support,  dont forget new compliance policies and security protocols that will need to be developed, and custom made software the company will have to pay for when legacy software does not work, and there are no alternatives .... stares with hate at maximo and people soft .... I cant remember does acrobat pro have an linux version ... i think it does ...   oh and then cognos, bmc remedy and what ever else your running 

A lot of which is neccessary even when just changing from XP to Vista or XP to Win7.