They really do. Let me ask you a question:

What functionalities of MSO and OOo do you use? Do you use Word/Writer to make documents? Do you use Excel/Calc to put things in rows and columns? Do you use Powerpoint/Impress to make slideshows?

Then you’ve never scratched the surface of the functionality present in either of these office suites. You might say that they’re both way, way too complicated and unwieldy for you. You need a knife, what you have is the USS Enterprise.

Or, do you use Excel/Calc, for instance, as an application development platform of some kind? (And, tangentially, are you completely and utterly insane?)

I have been emailed a thousand spreadsheets and text documents. Literally. And I have never come across one that did anything other than page layout and a few basic formulas.

MS Office and OpenOffice both suck because they try to be both simple and complex and in trying to be both actually arrive at neither. In your typical office, what do you need to do? You need to collaborate with co-workers, you need to share calendars, you need to email, that sort of thing. None of these things is a single-user process, none of these things exists as an island.

Why then do both the major office suites insist on foisting this single-user mentality from the 1990s on us? I don’t want to edit a document, save it, have someone else edit the document, save it (or even worse, have it emailed around). I don’t want a document with an embedded application.

I want a document that I can edit in real-time while other people edit it in real time as well. Why has no one done this? Why are spreadsheets and text documents still two different things? Why has no one put them together?

Microsoft, at least, has tried, in its dorky, cumbersome way, to remedy this with a Sharepoint Portal, but even that’s a weak solution to a huge problem. Throwing a bunch of wikis and shared calendars at a paradigm that needs radical change isn’t going to solve anything; they’re merely adding another layer of abstraction on a layer of cruft and acting as if this is a new and radical idea.

It isn’t. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice are old and busted. Where’s the new hotness? Why is a company like Google trying to re-re-invent the wheel by replicating this old and busted on the internet with AJAX for crying out loud? Talk about bolting crap to crap! Where’s the new and different and outside the box and productivity-enhancing program that’s going to rock my socks off?

It’s not just that MSO and OOo are boring. They are, but that’s not the problem. They don’t meet my needs. I don’t need to make a document. I consider the idea of a document out-dated. I don’t need to save or auto-save or click through menus or scroll along a ribbon. I consider both those interface ideas out-dated.

Old and busted. So tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where is the new hotness?

Or, who is going to build the better mousetrap?