What will it take for the stranglehold on Microsoft Office to be overcome? One big stumbling block is finding employees who know how to use the new software. I work for an employment service, and people with MS Office skills are thinner on the ground than you would think. So given the high costs of finding, hiring, and training workers, if it's hard enough for an employer to find new employees who know MS Office, they will be unlikely to want to switch to a different product, where skilled individuals are even rarer. I would think that breaking MSFT's stranglehold would require, along with file compatibility, making the UI of competing office suites as similar to MS Office as possible, so that it will be easy for people who only know MS Office to switch over. I don't know how feasible this is, especially re: "plagarism" concerns.