Obviously I do not believe that you should listen to all user requests, in fact I think that most can be ignored. However, I do not think my dad is unlike a lot of our dads/cousins/in-laws/familynontechie. I truly believe that a majority of non technical people would by "Office™ for X" simply because of the first word, and /that/ is when you start to listen to your customers.

Microsoft is not a niche software company. They dump billions down holes every year for completely fruitless projects. They could have easily bought dataviz, called documents to go Office Mobile, and called it a day.