“One of the things about MS Office is that it got a good start on Open Office and people tend to stick with things they know.”
Fair enough, training and comfort cost must be considered when platforming an individual. But the example that you have to be some kid in a village without power in India to get a great experience out of OO is specious at best. Most college students could do just fine with OO. Most people who (1) Have a job which has not revolved around an office sweet, (2) Use of an office sweet is basic, Are part of a much larger group being moved in on OSS direction for cost savings will be just as well off in 1-3 months with either sweet.
Its all going to be situational, new company with no current software load (or growing company) versus an established company with a long term site license.
“In addition, most people are not caught up in the Microsoft is the evil empire stuff that the Unix/Java/Linux crowd is caught up in and that Open Office was created for.”
That’s not what openoffice was created for. It was created to be free not to be ‘ATBM’ Keep in mind at the time when work on Openoffice began there were already well known alternatives to MS such as corel. OO was started by the makers of Star Office in order to have the OSS community help them with the development of their product.
“But I must say that if this was all written in Java and is reasonably stable, that says a lot about the effort that went into it.”
I don’t think it was written in Java until after Sun got into the mix in 2000. But it is pretty stable, and portable.