Probably serious. I'm a college senior majoring in journalism, and I really don't like/need Microsoft Office. The applications take far too long to start up and are filled with bells and whistles I don't need at all or don't use the vast majority of the time.
In fact, I've been a heavy writer since my early days in high school and since then I've used TextEdit almost exclusively and OpenOffice.org when I needed something like a word count.
I really love Power Point, but it doesn't deliver anything I need that I can't get for free from Google Drive.
And Excel is fine for the people who really need it for data entry and stuff, but I find the application very unfriendly to new users like me. And if you're SERIOUS about making a graph for a presentation, you should really be using Adobe software, instead of Excel which can knock out a graph really quick but is incredibly restrictive when it comes to adorning your graph with labels.
Basically, Microsoft Office is good software, but there are many people out there like me who've found perfectly feasible work-arounds that don't require giving more money to Microsoft and still satisfy all of our needs just fine.