I really dislike Microsoft. Really. They are a shameless corporation, who lies to the public, who deliberately makes their software not comply with open standards so that when people get different behavior with other software they assume (wrongly) it's the other software that is weird. I've also had friends get very lousy customer service... and have to go for months without Office because their registration keys didn't work, and so on. They'll change formats and so on just so you have to upgrade to keep current, etc.
I'm a big fan of all Open Source, and the fact that Open Office exists, is as rich as it is, and is available for free is just amazing.
That said, I definitely can see why many people might prefer Word to OO Writer. There's a lot about OOo that is just not up to par. The lack of support for open type fonts is just unbearable, though they're supposedly fixing that soon. And the presentation software for OOo -- can't remember the name now -- is just plain unusable.
Still, as a linux user, I'm stuck using Open Office when, as happens so often, someone sends me a .doc or .docx attachment.
I tried Google docs, but it is really way too primitive for my needs. But for very simple documents--the letter to grandma--it probably could serve the purpose. What I do like about google docs is the limited sharing ability ... It makes it easy to send someone quick comments on something, or make something available to someone without messing around with email attachments or multiple files.
... and actually that's one thing that scares me about Office 2010, since it's going to have similar features. People are going to expect you to be able to use its cloud computing features and share that way, but they probably won't make them so that linux users can access them, even with the web versions of Word, Excel, etc., that they're offering. That's going to be a major bummer for linux users. Indeed, I really hope they don't do this in a way that shuts out everyone who is unwilling to pay their exorbitant prices. (Or maybe I should wish that, since it may be their demise.)
But let's cut to the chase. If you're typesetting something you want to look professional, neither MS Office or Open Office fits the bill for me. I use
LaTeX. LaTeX is much more powerful and capable and flexible than either of these, and the resulting documents are breathtakingly beautiful, and typographically rich. Ligatures, kerning, end of line hyphenation by default, sophisticated paragraph and page layout algorithms, coupled with hyperlinked footnotes and endnotes and citations, and the best renderer for technical material like mathematics that exists. (And I use its beamer package for creating presentations.) And the mark-up is semantic rather than arbitrary. What could be better?
Sure it's got a big learning curve at first, but it's worth it.
Plus, like OOo, it's completely free, open sourced, and platform independent. And you can use whatever text editor you like to create the source files, or pick one of the many IDEs for it out there.
And here's an ideological pitch for you in its favor:
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient.
(And if you really hate to do your own mark-up, try
LyX, for superior typography with the ease of a traditional word processor.)