I recently mentioned that I've moved to a new role in the Office organization, and now that my replacement over in DPE is officially signed, sealed, and soon to be delivered, I just wanted to mention how excited I am about the latest addition to the Open XML team here at Microsoft.
Eric White is the new Open XML technical evangelist, and he brings a wealth of XML development experience to the role. He's the guy who wrote all of the Linq to XML samples for MSDN, which happen to use Open XML documents as their inputs. (An early sign of Eric's natural fit for the role he's taking on. :-))

Surprise, the standardization process is not over, it's hot and they change the horse. Doug gets out of the fire and poor little Eric White would have to evangelize the OOXML scam. Erik seems to be the guy that talks code and is assigned to take out the trash now:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ericwhite/

My goal with this blog is to make myself available to XML developers who use the docs that I write. A secondary goal is write about some of my opinions on MSFT, writing, what's wrong with the docs at MSFT and how to fix them, what I like and don't like working here, and possibly even some of my non-technical interests.

You see how humilation works at Microsoft: You get the guys that preserve an independent mind in charge of propaganda for broken specs and let them keep a big smile about standardization torture. Smile, not laughter.

Reprogramming Eric

First you break him for later reprogramming. Instrumental are here mental buffer overflows by OOXML spec reading exercises (which qualifies as torture-on-the-job).

Eric just finished reading the Primer (Part 3) of the Open XML spec, and I know he has a bunch of ideas about cool samples and demos for Open XML developers. He'll be officially in the new role at the end of the year, so watch for some great Open XML content from him in 2008 on his blog, OpenXMLDeveloper, and other places. Eric has a lot to teach all of us about how to take Open XML development to new levels. (Source)

then you feed in all the truthiness about Open XML
…and a new Open XML tech evangelist zombie is born.
Let us watch how Eric will perform to advocate multiple standards and high fidelity backwards compatibility.