1. Paid support.
2. Widely accepted format.
3. A good product.
4. A product capable of more than other office suites.
5. A product that supports a damn good well known collaboration tool.

just a few points there.

You can hardly dispute that it is a good product, it has become the de facto standard for that reason - there are plenty of competitor products that have been around over time before the big Office boom.

The last time I used OO I found it fiddly, temperamental and unrewarding quite frankly. Simple tasks such as setting up margins were made awkward and didnt quite work as expected.

You can hardly dispute that it is a good product, it has become the de facto standard for that reason - there are plenty of competitor products that have been around over time before the big Office boom.

The last time I used OO I found it fiddly, temperamental and unrewarding quite frankly. Simple tasks such as setting up margins were made awkward and didnt quite work as expected.

There are two issues. One is it any better than the latest version of other software available? Quite frankly it isnt providing you know what you are trying to do. In order to attempt to be more friendly there has been a load of excess dross thrown in and some items like the paperclip. You really like Clippy, do you?

Second is that once they were put into the position of supplying the base operating system and the software then there was no other possibility, they had to become the defacto standard for office software. Only a complete and utter incompetent in charge could have resulted in anything less.

To be honest many of the other packages available were less easy to use but the rampant use of proprietary formats made it unlikely that they would survive. Some of the opposition was better than M$ but people were blinded by the compatibility issue to any such factors.

Earlier versions of M$ Office showed that they were equally bad, it wasnt until the enormous monetary advantage was pushed into usability that it improved much.

Is OO actually any less over-killy? In my experience of using it, admittedly at least a couple of versions ago, it was pretty clunky really.

About the same, they are both chasing the same markets. To be honest there isnt a wordprocessor that just does the basics you need any more.

No one wants that any more though Serious, with all the computing power available these days people want their word processor to act as a full-on desktop publishing suite for the money, anything less and you might as well use Wordpad.

Office/Word reached the saturation point of functionality a few years back I reckon, anything new is cosmetics as stated or gimmicky stuff.

The one that really did that effectively was Wordstar 2.0, and it did it better than M$. Still didnt help the situation though. I think we agree on the saturation point at least. There certainly is a gap between the two and probably programs trying to fill it but its difficult for them to get noticed.

Lets be clear though for a minute - the reason Office dominates the market is not your really your average joe-soap having a copy on his home machine, its the 10,000 seat corporate licences they sell by the bucket-load.

When Im using Office, Im not going to be using this mythical "everything you need is effectively notepad" style-word processor. Almost every document I write is going to have sections, styles, tables, complicated headers and footers, ToCs, embedded files, images, diagrams, and other kinds of crap, and in my experience Word is the most consistent tool out there for achieveing a repeatable style. Im not saying OO cant do it, it probably can these days, but to me it doesnt feel quite so slick as MS - maybe thats just familiarity though.

Either way, every company I deal with produces documents which have obviously had a fairly heavy flavouring of formatting applied, and if I recieved for example a design document these days that was just a piece of continuous prose, Id bounce it straight back out the door.

Very few people use spreadsheets.

Again, this is utter rubbish. Money makes the world go around, and Excel is surprisingly good at counting...

Indeed, Word wont open a CSV file (these are used everywhere), something, again, Excel is very good at doing.