Well, then they may lose control of the situation. Open Office, as of v3, is competitive and reads and writes Office-format files. It's not quite as polished and complete as office, but I'd say about 98%. Plenty enough to be competitive anyway. For example, I recently built a new box and loaded Open Office first, and haven't yet bothered to take the 15 minutes or so to load Orifice. It's been like three months and the 2% or whatever of deficiencies in Open Office haven't irritated me sufficiently that I would take even the 15 minutes to load Office and fix the problem.
I use NeoOffice on the Mac and it’s awfully slow. Unless the Linux OpenOffice version performs better, they’ve still got a little work to do. In the past the problem has always been document archives and formatting - alternate office suites never quite render the tables and headers in those older Word documents correctly, and most businesses consider that a deal-breaker.