[slowpoke]

> Yup, Microsoft Word is much nicer than LibreOffice Writer or AbiWord. But you don't know that if you've never used it. Or, you don't care, because you're writing a memo, not a book. And that's $600 Microsoft loses right there.

The very last thing for which I'd consider using MS Word (or any WYSIWYG processor, for that matter) would be writing a book (or any prolonged text which concentrates on the content). Seriously, if you do this you've never even thought about the fact that there are alternatives which are vastly superior for such tasks (one of which being plaintext. Yes, plaintext). I don't get why you would even consider writing a book in a document processor - save for LyX, but that's not exactly a standard word processor.

Sorry for the rant, I mostly agree with you. The general development still scares me though.