During my time in corporate IT, I discovered that MS Office and related applications rarely (if ever) did anything that actually contributed to executing
business rules, strategies or missions. From what I saw, the vast majority of company-paid time was spent on tasks that served personal motives, and didn't actually contribute to the operation of the business itself.
Corporate ladder-climbers spent hours and hours of paid time making slick-looking documents to make themselves look good and nothing else. Lots of highly paid executives spent countless billable hours just playing. They freely admitted that they were having fun, and should have delegated the task to a subordinate who was trained to produce the document quickly and efficiently.
Speaking of that, I never worked in a corporation that actually paid to have their employees trained in how to use MS Office. Some people who got certified were hired in part because of that certification, but most of the time employees were expected to "just know" or spend nearly unlimited company hours for self-training.
I concluded that MS Office might be the single most destructive thing that a business could bring inside its doors.
The only saving grace was MS Access, which tended to be interesting only to the people who would use it to do useful things. And the home version of MS Office doesn't include Access.
We're all free to spend as much personal time as we want in formatting the perfect Word document, find new things to use MS Excel for (I saw someone make a detailed floor plan using Excel!) and create a PowerPoint presentation that can actually cause people to die of boredom. If that's your thing, and you're willing to pay good money for this toy, then you're probably also paying to have the latest exciting Windows version as well.
It is nice to see that Linux has made enough inroads onto the business desktop that Microsoft is seriously considering writing applications for it.
