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I never said Open Office sucks.

I know you didn't. I apologize for not being more clear--or for choosing an imperfect analogy. I was just trying to illustrate how useless out-of-date knowledge is.

The bottom line is however, is that if you are paying someone 6 figures and he/she wants MS Office, you would be nuts not to give it to him/her.

It would depend on what they want to do with it. WP and spreadsheets don't require a $500 piece of software. If s/he is worth six figures, then they are capable enough to learn a slightly different interface from MS 2007 in order to write a memo or produce a presentation.

I am sure there are many cases where you are correct, but alot of the power users I have dealt with have many queries saved in Access for hitting databases, lots of Excel and Word macros that they port to each new version, and they create complex pivot tables that they then import into Access and use to update database servers. Many actively write VBA Script in Excel or Access to support other employees that are not as savvy.

So when faced with those situations, it is easier to just say: here is your MS Office.