The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. The bookstore has shelves of books on Office. When there are three books on LibreOffice, I'll consider buying a lottery ticket.

I wish things were different. But they aren't.

Actually I've found the exact opposite. FOSS tends to have very active and very engaging communities that actually provide answers. Whereas on most win/ms software forums, there are usually a ton of people who are just parroting each other without understanding how completely far of they are from the crux of the problem. Of course this is all just a bunch of anecdotes.

The entire mission of the Open Office suite seems to be to copy Microsoft Office as much as possible. It isn't trying to change the way people think about document editing, or provide more meaningful ways to express ideas. Microsoft created Visio, so let's go make Draw. What is the point? What value does recreating successfully developed and supported applications provide?

I primarily use a Linux machine to develop, so not having to dual boot or use a VM/Second computer every time someone sends me a .xls is very useful.

The interface mimics (older versions) of office precisely to make the learning curve for previous office users as shallow as possible.

Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office because their mission is to be Microsoft Office, rather than to surpass it. They can never be a perfect copy.

More importantly, let's say that Open Office does try to blaze a trail to an extent that you mention. I would wager that it would probably come out like Blender, where Blender tried to make the ideal 3D creation toolkit (compared to say Maya). Blender's great! It's very powerful, it can do ALL kinds of things. However, before the v2.5 UI overhaul it was incredibly goddamn hard to learn and so it was only useful to a small section of their potential interested users.

By avoiding this, Open Office tries to cater to what people are familiar with so they can use it right after installing it. They don't have to waste time trying to adapt to a new piece of software.

Surpassing MS Office at it's own game would probably cost far more resources than Libreoffice could dream of having without having google or somebody throw a ton of money at it.

There are of course many projects that are disrupting office for certain use cases. Examples would be MediaWiki, Wordpress and google docs.

Microsoft Office for Linux did not and does not already exist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8

What is amazing is that an open source project comes anywhere close to keeping up with what is one of the flagship products of one of the largest, most profitable companies the world has ever known.

Well, I'm not here to piss all over the project (which is amazing). However. There are about four or five things I need a spreadsheet to do, which OpenOffice does not do and which MS Office does do (one example off the top of my head is generating polynomial regression lines on charts--I specifically need to generate quadratic fits). I've found that many people are in a similar situation, but the things they need are slightly different from the ones I need.

So when someone posts a story about how OpenOffice is "just as good" as MS Office--or at least strongly implies that by claiming the value of a copy of OpenOffice is the same as MS Office retail--those people (like me) tend to come out of the woodwork and tell the other people (like you) the following: Although OpenOffice is a fantastic project, it just doesn't do what I need it to do. Which means that I am going to continue to forking over $90 to MS to get a spreadsheet (and word processor and presentation software) that does what I need it to do.

It's similar to IE era, when majority thought IE is the internet and couldn't imagine other browsers.