One day when my kids were little, I sat with them and watched "Barney and Friends." After a few minutes I said, "This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen, I can't stand this." To which my wife replied, "That's because it wasn't made for you." And sure enough, my kids loved it.
For those of you who who are able to do your work in iWork (please stop putting an s at the end.) congratulations to you. You know what? Office was not written for you.
But please stop with the stupid, "who wants this" and "I don't need this" comments because, yeah we get it. Not everyone needs Word. But there are plenty of us out here that do need it and need serious tools that are compatible with everyone else that we have to work with. And those of us who do need Office don't really care that you don't, or that your hatred of a tech company leads you to go out of your way to avoid their software.
/irritated rant
The problem is that fewer and fewer people actually need (and even fewer use) the advanced features in Office, companies and people are realising that more and more. If a company's CFO today isn't looking at this internally and trying to figure out how to reduce their MS license fees, that person should be fired because they are wasting the company's money. I've got lots of experience in big and small corporates and the vast majority of users never do anything more than what today's free alternatives provide.
It wasn't always that way, it used to be that MS Office provided an additional amount of features above and beyond the competition that warranted spending money with MS, but not any more (for most people). Yes, there are people that need pivot tables and other features in MS Office, but the vast majority of users (corporate and home) do NOT need these features and can now find them in free alternatives on every single platform, some even cross-platform, something that until now MS refused to do anything but bash. MS is a software company and they refused to feed off any milk except that which came from their own cash cow, Windows, much to the dismay and chagrin of people who actually used non-Windows but wanted MS Office on those devices.
Office suite products provide functionality that OSes and basic add ons are implementing more and more as basic functionality, and users are expecting and demanding this basic functionality be included. The amount of functionality remaining to be R&D'd in these products is negligible - there is no revolution in office suite products remaining, those days are over. The functionality yet to come is cross platform support, but for some reason the king of this segment, the undisputed king, has refused to play and now years later they finally, FINALLY show up to the party (hopefully this rumour is true, it spells nothing but goodness for Apple and the iPad), and yet the fact they ignored a major platform so long, that's not what you find irritating?
Lots of other people do, and rightfully so. And the majority of the rest think, what's the value of this I already get this functionality for free from myriad other vendors.
This action is just soooooo typical of Microsoft.
