Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> There's no *technical* reason, however, why somebody can't go out and 
> implement an alternative office suite. (Apart perhaps from file 
> compatibilty.) Yet nobody has done this.

  Nobody has done this? You yourself have at least heard of OpenOffice,
which is actually quite popular on the free side of the world. There are
other alternatives (many of which are more lightweight), such as KOffice,
which seems to be rather solid. From the commercial side we have some big
names like Corel WordPerfect Office (I'm pretty sure even you have at least
heard of WordPerfect), among others. On the MacOS side we have iWork, which
is Apple's own office suite, which usually means it's pretty solid (Apple
tends to invest in quality and stability).

  The problem is not that alternatives don't exist. The problem is that
MS has got itself into the lucky position of being the only known provider
of office suites to most people, and even when people get aware of
alternatives, these alternative will be always and forever be measured
against MS Office ("will it open .doc and excel files?"). Sadly, for an
office to have any chance of succeeding, it has to be able to hack support
for proprietary Microsoft file formats.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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