At the time it happened, I'd have been sympathetic to that phrasing. In the couple decades then, I'm grown much more sanguine about it. The notion that users a

At the time it happened, I'd have been sympathetic to that phrasing. In the couple decades then, I'm grown much more sanguine about it. The notion that users are being somehow kept hostage by not being able to pick and choose their own suite of document components is almost completely contrary to the history of consolidation within this industry and others. Picking a collection of best of breed software components is asking way, way, way too much of the vast majority of users, who mainly had a specific set of goals, one of the most important of which is to get on with the rest of life. About the best that can be achieved with this sort of software architecture is add on components that fill specific gaps in existing suites (and then likely get rolled into the suites themselves).