> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.
This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.
I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.
Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.
This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.
I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.
Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.