XML might have some long term potential, but that is hardly worthy of an upgrade
MSN Instant Messanger is intergrated into Office, I don't know what kind of feature that is.
Smart Tags are all over the place, but the only time I think I have ever used those is pasting text to another document and using the smart tag to match it with the formatting of the document it was inserted into.
We have people here still using Word Perfect 3.5 For Mac and Office 97 who are doing just fine, we even have a few people using Lotus AmiPro!, your allowed to use whatever the hell you like here and eye candy really does not contribute to productivity all it does is make obsolete another generation of computers.
Microsoft Office has gone from a great productivity suite to the solution to a problem that doesn't exist,
There is nothing (that needs doing) that Microsoft Office does today that it couldn't do 6 years ago
The problem is the productivity suite kinda reached nirvana some time ago, and Microsoft doesn't want to let the golden goose die of old age.
There are going to be people running Windows and Office 2000 on Pentium II's 10 years from now, and that scares Microsoft and the rest of the industry to death.
Hogwash! These features are crucial in making this version of Office incompatible with earlier versions so that people will be forced to upgrade to the new version and the new licensing system...
All these added features are what MS biggest customer base asks for. Office and 'other' productivity suites are aimed at the business desktop not the home desktop.