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
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