Watch the video here (Silverlight needed)
Read the article here

OK, some of the points I agree with but on the whole I don't like the blatant "OpenOffice is a load of crap, MS Office is the superior product and you should buy it for your school/home/business and only learn this one product set".

"OpenOffice is crap, but then it is free and MS Office costs over £100*, so I will now STFU".

*Business licensing costs may vary upwards wildly.

I'm not watching the video. If it is as the title suggests then it sounds crass.

The thing is I MUCH prefer MS Office to OpenOffice. But now factor in cost and OpenOffice wins every single time.

How can using OpenOffice affect your grade at school? There is no qualification for that claim anywhere.

I never had any issues with Open Office until I found out (the hard way) that it can't run macros from MS Office. For me that makes it useless.

It was the cost grounds which got me to buy MS Office again, after having used OpenOffice for several years. OO.o just isn't cost effective, if you need to share documents. Like it or not, MS Office file formats are the defacto standard and OpenOffice makes a complete rats nest of formatting, even after nearly a decade of trying.

You're applying your experience to my argument though. As a home user there is no basis for me and the missus to have MS Office when OO is free. Sure there are benefits to having MS but for what we do at home we need nothing more than we get from OO. I even had an older version of MS on the desktop before having OO (maybe 2000) and she could easily move her OO document from her laptop (saved as .doc) to this and open/print fine.

the only word processor installed on my system is bean but i do all saved documents in word .doc file format
the rest of the family have MSO for the mac 2008, my word processing needs are very simple ...

I find OpenOffice adequate to my needs. Documents I receive from MSO users are displayed sufficiently enough for me, though I realise they are not identical.

At the end of the day, and I think people like Edd would agree, any serious document should be marked up using LaTeX

Macros haven't hit me yet, some simple Macros seem to work. It depends what the Macro is doing, most Macros I've come across seem to be trying to make a Word document/Excel Spreadsheet into quite a complex program rather than keeping Word for word processing and Excel for spreadsheet stuff - But that's a different rant.

Microsoft seem to be saying "Don't buy into open source - It will waste your time and cost you money", which is probably true for the Windows Admin who has gotten through the last couple of decades shoving a mouse across a desk to control the network. The same could be said in reverse, a seasoned Linux/UNIX administer would probably have the same experience if they switched their systems to Microsoft due to differences in the systems.

Open Source doesn't have any support - You can buy support contracts from Canonical and Red Hat, Oracle will (would?) give you a support contract for Star Office which is as good as OpenOffice really.

My major group-coursework group this year has decided on GoogleDocs No LaTeX & SVN for me!

I have used Open Office but was so used to MS Office that I reverted. I still have Mac Office 2004 as it does what I want and need. I might consider 2010 but am not in a rush to buy. I have used macros in the past when I have spread sheets that were in the Mb range, nearly 20 years ago. Though with larger capabilities I have not needed to do that any more. I will probably get Office at some point. It does what I want and I can find what I need with it. That is harder with Numbers and Pages.

i use libreoffice at home, it works fine for me

i actually prefer it to MS office 2007 we get forced to use at college, but atleast that supports ODT now

I've been using OO since v.1 and I love it.

Can't wait for Libre Office to get into its stride - some of the Go-OO improvements are really quite good.

Absolutely pathetic and so typical of the modern Microsoft.

I use iWork when I can, Openoffice when I can't. I begrudgingly use Office 2003 at work and hate it. I have 2007 at home and the ribbon drives me up the wall.

Why can't they try advertising the positives of their own products (if they can find some) rather than rubbishing their rivals?

Obviously taking a page out of the book of Apple