> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user. That is quite a lot in my book when you have thousands of users

It's really not. Office is the single MS product that is actually better than the competition (Libre, Apple, etc) and it's also THE core business software. Most businesses might have huge ERP systems, but the war is won in the Excel trenches. If you're an organization of 1,000+ users, $100kpa is nothing.

No one pays $99/user/year anyways.

I only write simple letters and, while I do actual accounting work in Excel which is just a little more than simple lists, I'm not using Excel as a database either... as I use databases for that (i.e. don't ask me how to do a VLOOKUP). Even in these simple tasks, MS Office is simply superior in terms of function and productivity if you are performing those simple tasks frequently enough.

Could I get by with LibreOffice or OpenOffice, yeah, and did so for a couple years straight and off/on before and after that time. I use to be annoyed to no end by the bloat and heaviness of MS Office... and then after prolonged use of LibreOffice/OpenOffice (yes, both), I came to greatly appreciate MS Office. The only part of office which I use regularly which I'm not very happy with is Outlook (OK, really only use Word, Excel, and Outlook... can't comment on the other parts of the suite as it's been more than a decade since I regularly used things like Access). I'm also disappointed by the Office 365 cloud integration/features: feels very much like a philosophical approach to technology that has lots of Microsoft servers in your enterprise's data center and the outside world is kept at bay rather than collaborated with... Google does that much better... LibreOffice not at all.

The number of quirks that caused something to not be quite right or the performance differences I experienced (noticeable in spreadsheets) makes free LibreOffice look very expensive and $99/yr MS Office look cheap. Much more productive in MS Office overall. Having managed IT operations in the corporate world, same experience there: the only place I would (and did) deploy OpenOffice (LibreOffice didn't exist yet) was to the field and the field being to retail chain store personnel. In the chain in question they only wrote simple letters and used spreadsheets for simple lists, generally had very little/no computer experience, and they didn't do office suite work with any regular frequency at all. In that case, the productivity hit was drowned out by the noise of overall lack of computer literacy and they didn't do those tasks with any real frequency, so the Office licenses really didn't make for good investment... but I can tell you that I deployed MS Office to all of the HQ staff and middle managers and glad to have done so.

In the past few years, I would probably rank the desktop office suites (meaning available for use on the desktop) as MS Office, G Suite, LIbreOffice. I have Office 365, but tend not to use the online versions of the apps so won't comment on them.

I actually agree that my accounts team would be more productive with Excel. But for the other 99% of users?

I disagree with your percentages and I wouldn't read my comment as only applying to the accounting team. I was an IT manager (and now business owner) doing budgeting, while that is/involves accounting, I am far away from being an accountant (or accounting clerk). Anyone doing even relatively trivial work in these products on a regular basis will benefit from the greater polish in the MS products compared to LibreOffice; again Google may be the logical and viable competitor in a casual-use, business scenario, but not LibreOffice.

Also, for those that are part of the teams of these managers and that have to collaborate with those that can gain direct advantage from the MS Office products, the MS Office/LibreOffice compatibility is simply quirky. It's not so bad if you're simply consuming the content, format isn't essential, and you're not contributing edits and such, but if format is essential or you are contributing/editing... again, the price of the license is not expensive given the productivity loss of people futzing with output due to incomplete compatibility. Finally, those in the office are more likely to already be familiar with MS operating systems and products. Even on the Mac I believe MS Office is still dominant in the office suite space. The productivity hit during training for a new UX vs. just paying the license is again, not supportive of using LibreOffice in any serious business context.

It is my opinion, so take it for what it's worth, that many will argue for the likes of LibreOffice on philosophical grounds rather than on the basis of the economics or product features/functions. And, in order to make their case, they nonetheless feel they have to rely on utilitarian arguments rather than on the merits of their root philosophical commitment. I don't think that's a useful strategy for that interest group when it's apparent that the value for money is actually there compared to the alternatives. I don't want to say that @jimnotgym is in this camp: I don't know; but I do see a similar commitment and line of reasoning from those I know to be.

$99 per year is pretty tiny per user. Remember that each of these users is being paid tens of thousands of dollars per year, which means that they will be generating (roughly, on average) 2-3x that in value for a company. $99 to make someone you're paying $30k more efficient is pretty good value.

It depends. I would give technically skilled users whatever they are productive in. I see plenty of users who would never get past sorting and filtering. Libre office calc is at least as four as excel for that

> Better at what?

Mostly, better at interoperating with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice works really well, but if you need perfect metric-compatibility, or macros, then it doesn't quite suffice. Likewise for Google Docs (and additionally, Google Slides lacks numerous features desirable for building good presentations).

> 365 starts at $99 a year, per user.

And at $150/yr it includes Exchange/SharePoint/Skype/Teams. The latter three aren't particularly exciting but not having to worry about email/calendaring is a big win.

Despite the quirkiness of eventually consistent email patterns, the calendar integration with exchange/outlook even on web is pretty damned nice. I'm getting used to the office gmail/docs/calendar, but the integration still isn't nearly as nice as outlook. The mail in gmail is much better though (as long as you stick to the web interface, go imap and prepare to be f'd up).

> Better at what?

Style support for documents. LibreOffice doesn't have complete style support. This is the one thing right now keeping me from even considering it.

What is it missing? Styles is something I think OO/LO do reasonably well already, and have done so since the StarOffice days. I am specifically talking about paragraph styles so I wonder if there is some other type of styles OO/LO is indeed missing.

I'm using styles in Writer in the same way as I do in Word.