Can Word open a .odt file?

According to published magazine articles during the evolution of the standard, Microsoft was late to the table with their OOXML proposal and really didn't expect it to become the standard. Microsoft planned on and built support for ODF into Office 2007 based on the assumption that ODT, not OOXML was most likely to be chosen as the open standard.

That again doesn't make sense. At that time MS already had a working implementation of ODT. If in addition to that they also expected it to become the standard for both ISO and ECMA, why should they waste time and resources on OOXML?

You have it almost right, but your time-line is a bit off. Microsoft went forward with support for ODT in Office 2007 (for Windows) which is why there is pretty good (but imperfect because they stopped working on it in the middle of things) support for ODT in the Windows version of Office. Since Microsoft had invested in support and ODT was working fiarly well, they just left it in the product.

When OOXML instead of ODT  was adopted as the official standard for everyone Microsoft had to change their design for Office 2007 (Windows) mid-stream and build around OOXML instead of ODT. Consequently, Office for Windows has some ODT support. Development of the Mac version of Office 2008 started a year later. By then, the accepted standard was OOXML instead of ODT, so there was no point in building ODT support into Office 2008 or any later edition of Office for Mac.

According to published magazine articles during the evolution of the standard, Microsoft was late to the table with their OOXML proposal and really didn't expect it to become the standard. Microsoft planned on and built support for ODF into Office 2007 based on the assumption that ODT, not OOXML was most likely to be chosen as the open standard.

That again doesn't make sense. At that time MS already had a working implementation of ODT. If in addition to that they also expected it to become the standard for both ISO and ECMA, why should they waste time and resources on OOXML?

Thanks for the reply but this is an unprofessional answer that seems to be promoting Microsoft word.

You appear to be a bit off here.  Just because OpenDocument was developed first does not mean that it is an old file format or in any way obsolete.  It is unfortunate that Microsoft chose to design another XML format rather than adopting OpenDocument and then contributing to developing it.  But, that is what happened and now we have two formats to worry about.

I realize that this is a Microsoft forum, however there is no reason for you to be disingenuous and provide disinformation to bad mouth other file formats.  To say that OpenDocument has been "discontinued" appears to be incorrect unless you have something to backup this claim, we have to presume that it is inaccurate.

Incidentally, you mention by reference the practice of storing old word processing files in editable format.  This probably isn't really a good practice since word processing formats change and are not always compatible.