For home/student use the Office Suite is quite cheap (I've seen Office 2003 for around $100 at Staples for a three-home user license). Microsoft is competing with stealing by pricing Office very low. Even for SMB and Enterprise users, sticking office isn't that much--on the purchase of a new machine Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PPT, Publisher and Outlook) costs about $190; I suspect enterprise customers are paying less than $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".
Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.
For me, the advantage is functionality. My soon-to-be-ex and very large company mandated use of Word for technical documentation awhile back. In my experience Word gets in the way in technical documentation more than anything. Productivity is horrible because of all the vagaries of Word, from its counterintuitive defaults for automatic grammer and spell checking to its tendency to change things on-the-fly and inconsistently with regards to styles. I have literally wasted hours and hours trying to make Word 2003 behave properly. It's ironic too because back in the early 90s, I co-authored a 700 page manual on a Mac with Word 4 that was not nearly so difficult. Essentially, in my experience and for my purposes ( internal and external software design documents ) Word is inadequate. Excel, on the other hand is fairly decent. Powerpoint is apprentice level. In comments responding to the article at EWeek, a poster brought up Visio as a distinguishing factor between MS Office and StarOffice. However, Visio is not part of MS Office and it's really not all that capable either. I have used it to generate architectural overviews for inclusion in both Word and Powerpoint. It's fairly mediocre in my experience. Mind you, I used Framemaker for a number of years and for technical documentation, it was the best product I've used. Powerful enough, but efficient enough not to get in the way of one's flow. In the final analysis, StarOffice, by emulating MS Office may be targetting a suboptimal product. (Excel excepted).
Disclaimer: YMMV and OALA, EHOATAS
