This is good news (divide and conquer) (Score 1)

This is a good thing because the absence of M$ offshit is what keeps a lot of people away from alternative platforms. We all know better than to be caught using that junk, but the majority of the population are already familiar with these apps.

Given the ability to use word or excel on linux, the operating system will become even more trivial than before, so competetion will take place based upon technical merits. As we all know, micro$oft cannot even begin to compete in terms of technical competence, so they will loose their os monopoly.

Once that's gone, then alternative ways of working will be much more accessable to the masses, and people will realize there's more than one way (the microsoft way) to go about things. And once we expose people to the wonders of the world of free software, they will relize that there are really excellent applications out there that are totally free (gimp, lyx, emacs, etc..).

The only downside to this is of course if the availibility of apps that are 'good enough' deters potential developers from working on superior projects. Canonical example of this is netscape, whose browser has been proverbially 'good enough', good enough to restrict the user base of potential projects enough to effectively kill them off.