It's a huge market, and it's uncracked despite user pain. Why? It's a boring question in terms of technology, but not in terms of thinking about user needs an

It's a huge market, and it's uncracked despite user pain. Why? It's a boring question in terms of technology, but not in terms of thinking about user needs and behavior. And it's pretty interesting in terms of the amount of money that could flow if the market were cracked, too. I think the two big reasons the Office market remains uncracked are: 1) incompatibility fears 2) opportunity cost Incompatibility fear is a big one. A good friend refuses to use MS Office for Mac because she is afraid of incompatibilities. This is rational. The documents she's sending out impinge on multimillion dollar deals, some of which get finalized at the 11th hour. She can't tolerate additional risk in her workflow. Continuing to use her, and Office for Mac, as an example, "opportunity cost" means that she can bill to her clients at a pretty good hourly rate, or she can spend her time learning about and deploying Parallels and Bootcamp so she could enjoy OS X and still be confident that her Office documents will be viewable and editable by her colleagues. This just isn't a good use of her time, unless she happens to enjoy technical puttering (she doesn't). I think she's pretty emblematic of this problem. If you can't get her to use an web-based Office substitute, I submit that you haven't cracked the Office market. I think that this problem is harder, and in some ways more interesting, than the technical problem of how to make a nifty Office-like web app.