The rise and fall of MS Office

I agree that MS office reached its peak functionality with the 97 version, and from then on it was just the addition of small features which nobody used, or confusing re-arrangements of the menus. OpenOffice can now do what most users want from an office productivity suite, and the Google tools are also quite functional and convenient. If MS continues to rely upon Office as a major cash cow in future I think they're going to be in for a nasty surprise. If the economic situation takes a downturn things like expensive and complex proprietary software licensing is going to be amongst the first luxuries to face the budgetary firing squad.