It seems that Larry Ellison ought to love OpenOffice. It's a really inexpensive way to constrain Microsoft's air supply. When OpenOffice reached feature parit

It seems that Larry Ellison ought to love OpenOffice. It's a really inexpensive way to constrain Microsoft's air supply. When OpenOffice reached feature parity with Office 2003, Microsoft was stuck between a rock and a hard place. If it didn't do something semi-profound with the suite, it risked being compared side-to-side with a free competitor. However, if it innovated, it risked alienating those users who found comfort in the familiar. Could the 2007 "ribbon" have been a competitive response? Or, was it just a way to differentiate its next version so users might want to upgrade? Also, because of OpenOffice, it's harder for Microsoft to extract high prices from Corporate America for Office. If it gets too greedy, CIOs will start to consider what the retraining costs would be to adopt OpenOffice. What's the total development cost for OpenOffice per year? $50M? Its existence probably costs Microsoft $1B in lost revenue opportunity compared to a world in which no feature parity competitors exist. The real threat to both OO and Office is obviously the web, but killing .doc and .xls as exchange formats will be as tough as killing off the fax machine. It's not like Oracle cares if OO dies -- as long as MSOffice dies along with it.