Groklaw has it. [groklaw.net]

It's very hard not to agree with the court that Microsoft wilfully infringed. Furthermore, it seems they expected to be caught, and to lose the inevitable suit - and didn't care either. Not hard to see why: The damages awarded are equivalent to just two days' revenue for Microsoft (although they infringed for five years). As a commenter pointed out, that's why such cases are unlikely to change their posture on software patents; even when they lose in that arena (and they are serial infringers, frequently losing such cases) - they have already made a huge profit on the whole dirty business. Same old Microsoft.

The way damages were calculated is detailed by the document linked (and was upheld by appeal, as it most likely substantially underestimated the real damages).

That's utopian thinking. For home use, I more or less agree with you. Business users have a lot of finely detailed and rigidly laid out documents, sometimes with proprietary macro or VBA coding in them. This stuff would be a huge pain to translate to an open standard, and there's no guarantee that OOo will display them faithfully and with fidelity.

Plus, with a MS Office contract, you have a software vendor to fall back to when things go wrong. You don't get this to the same extent with OSS, which is why business is often slow to adopt it.

What the hell kind of bullshit is that? Oh, we have someone to choke, we can blah blah blah. What is that, some kind of joke? Really, are you a village idiot or something? I've seen that piece of crap spewed so many times and still I see morons spewing it "oh, I have a contract blah blah, you know, for restitution'. NO ONE CAN GET IT FROM THEM! What world are you living in? SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, NOT EVEN THE WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY!!! Its been in their license boiler plate for years! Someone to CHOKE???? Thats just a JOKE!!!

Oof!:

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.105855000 [vmware.com]

Not a big deal for lots of groups, but a show stopper for lots of others.

And then they use Word... of all programs... to do that?
That’s like drawing pictures in MS Paint. ^^

For that task, the area is not “word processing”, but “DTP”.
InDesign, QuarkXPress, Scribus and (La)TeX would be the tools for that.

The “quality” of layout that you can do in MS programs, you can do in OOo too.
There is no guarantee that MS documents look right in OOo, true. But on top of there also being no guarantee that MS documents will display right in other versions from MS, there is a guarantee that open documents will not display right in MS at all.

For sending around documents, with a guaranteed layout, you use PDF anyway. Anything else would look ridicoulous and pointy-haired.*

Stop spreading that lie. There are many companies out there who gladly sell you professional support.
I wonder if MS will ever change the application and add new code for you... Because they can, and you can afford it too. :)

* Yes, I laughed at my ex-boss for sending me stuff in MS formats. Then I founded my own company, telling them I’d come back when I could buy them for some peanuts. Now they were sold for a single peanut. I was there. I laughed. ^^
In the end you control your own value, what you accept, and what not.

But what it doesn't do well enough to compensate for the $200 price of Word, is handle the typical exchange of documents between business users, all of whom add or remove mark-up and editing. In fact, Word didn't really even support this very well itself for a long time. And the result is usually a complete mess of course, but it's passable and it facilitates collaboration among several workers.

I've used the markup feature in OpenOffice Writer several times (I moonlight as a technical writer sometimes and I have to deal with documents that have inline corrections originating in Word) and it passes muster. The color coding does not always work right (I sometimes set it, send the document to the client, and then have to reset it when I get it back) but the record of who made each edit is still intact even after several revisions, so it is no big deal. Granted, there's room for improvement, but the feature generally works as of OO.o v3. It used to be terrible in previous versions, so what is there is already a huge improvement.

Well, yes, obviously any "custom" XML added by others could not have been specified as a part of the OOXML file format. But the ability to support and ignore (rather than silently remove) custom XML in the OOXML file format is a vital part of it being the extensible and interoperable format that it was advertised as. Pulling the rug out on that interoperability years later is completely consistent with Microsoft's modus operandi.

Users with a support contract (read: volume license) are under no obligation to use the most current version, and can in fact install any previous versions.

As Windows 2000 has not yet fallen out of support, our Windows Server 2008 R2 licenses may be used to acquire and install Windows 2000. I don't know if we can get Office 2000 still, but definitely 2003.

APP-V for Windows does the same thing at, I want to say $20/client/year. Virtualizes apps, lets you manage them from group policy, etc.

The number one problem I used to have was in style codes with built-in numbers, which is a very useful thing for the documents I write. They used to get f*cked from time to time, with the font of the number ending up different from the rest of the line. Then, one day, I had the same problem with a document that had never seen OO. The problem seems to be an inconsistency in MS Word over how it stores style codes internally.

Now, I just leave the number out of the codes til the end, and no problems converting anything.

That's a pretty broad statement. Would you be a little more specific please?

OOo presentation works fine for me, and imports Powerpoint presentations at least as well as different versions of Office do.

It doesn't try to be a clone.

OpenOffice.org includes interface and workflow design to make switching between MS Office and OOo easier. The developers are very well aware [linuxjournal.com] of the tradeoff between duplicating MS Office's rather haphazard menu/button layout and replacing it with something more logical but unfamiliar.