Microsoft Says “Open Office is Just Fine”

When you decode all the spin in the article, this is what you get:
“It really depends upon what job you’re trying to do. Certainly, if you’re just trying to write a few notes or something, Open Office is just fine. The truth is though that Open Office.org is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focused on 10 years ago when the model was an individual user working at their individual PC,” says Alan Yates (General Manager, Information Worker Group at Microsoft - see photo).
“The world and Microsoft software has grown way beyond that to make it very easy to do what used to be very hard things. Most documents today are not done by one individual. They’re done by multiple people working on a project at once. Essentially, Open Office is fine if you have very limited needs because it was really designed around what Microsoft Office products were designed around 10 years ago.” That's spin for saying that the only people who are getting any value out of new versions of Microsoft Office are large corporate environments that have the technical resources and money to deploy all their "cool server features".
Now that Microsoft has taken my money (and spent it) for products I bought from them in the last 10 years, it's very nice of them to tell me that they won't support my product and more and I should upgrade to get more bloatware that I don't need in the vain hope that the parts that I do need have been made more reliable. I don't think so.
The only reason I don't use Open Office is because they don't have a decent database program, like Microsoft Access97. And the reason I haven't upgraded to a newer version of Office is that there are no amazingly new, stunningly wonderful features in Office 2000, 2002 or 2003 that justify the cost. And I was stung by the numerous bugs in the Access 2000 Runtime that forced me to go back to Access97 so the data wouldn't get corrupted. Also, Access 2003 doesn't run on Windows 98, which halves my client base.

Read all the Microsoft spin at Microsoft says Open Office.org 10 years behind