MS Office is a great suite of software but if you don't actually utilize its extended feature set there are good alternatives that cost a lot less. I think more companies will go this route in the future or at least migrate to Office Online. One of the biggest issues I see with Office is the expense of keeping a homogeneous environment. Every company I've worked for seems to have at least 3 different versions of MS Office at any given time. Sometimes more. We have a decade span -- Office 97 to Office 2007. That presents a lot of support challenges. With a cheaper, or free, product you can always keep people on a standard version. I find the variation in Office versions with radically different UIs (2k to 07 for example) makes switching to an alternative a bit easier. People have learned to hunt & seek for features so if something is in a slightly different spot in OpenOffice it's not a big deal.