There is a reason IBM's developers have been given to work on the project too. To ensure IBM gets heavy influence on what is merged and probably because it will be difficult like other said
I imagine IBM want to get so involved, nobody else will want to with Open Office of the big corporates. Not a bad thing really as long as IBM don't muck it up. At the moment, I don't really see the point of Libre Office until IBM begin to screw up Open Office as it is essentially a similar code base and they are working toward mostly similar goals.
Microsoft is NOT good at this.
Just like in the mobile OS space, they are years late and several dollars short.
Late to mobile? Windows Mobile was around for years, almost a decade when they killed it. Microsoft's problem is it copies its competitors and offers little new when their own strategy isn't working. Phone 7 is an iPhone clone that is promising to be friendlier to hackers to get developers on board and using a Nokia deal to try to grab marketshare.
Ms had a greate mobile product with Windows Mobile that had some problems that they never managed to solve to make a pleasant user experience and decided to sack most of the team and base Phone 7 off Zune and go again with the lessons they had learned from Windows Mobile, the same lessons their competitors learned and stole their market share away from them and then people claim Apple did it first. Having worked on Windows Mobile devices, its problems were mostly that they never seemed to recover from that initial phase of rushed development to get something out there and the need to support those mistakes prevented the platform moving forward properly.
"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." -- Mark Twain