[trbs]

You make it sound like rewriting MS Office is a bad thing. At its core, MS Office is a very solid piece of software, so why spend resources and divert focus to try to improve on something Microsoft has already made near-perfect? And rewriting it under the GPL license (so it's free) adds value to the project as well. Not to mention that by rewriting it, you make it easy for people to pick up your project easily.

[overgryphon]

Microsoft hasn't made Office perfect, that is the point. Why is Open Office spending all of their considerable resources on mere copying, instead of producing something valuable all of their own?

Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office because their mission is to be Microsoft Office, rather than to surpass it. They can never be a perfect copy.

[trbs]

Saying that Open Office isn't as good as MS Office because it's trying to imitate them is a very ambitious statement. Especially considering that the developer base for the two are different in many respects.

More importantly, let's say that Open Office does try to blaze a trail to an extent that you mention. I would wager that it would probably come out like Blender, where Blender tried to make the ideal 3D creation toolkit (compared to say Maya). Blender's great! It's very powerful, it can do ALL kinds of things. However, before the v2.5 UI overhaul it was incredibly goddamn hard to learn and so it was only useful to a small section of their potential interested users.

By avoiding this, Open Office tries to cater to what people are familiar with so they can use it right after installing it. They don't have to waste time trying to adapt to a new piece of software.

[jiggy2011]

I see open/libreoffice as a shim product the same was as I see WINE. In an ideal world nobody would ever send me a .doc file, but they do so having a way to open it allows me to look to the future without breaking with the past.

Surpassing MS Office at it's own game would probably cost far more resources than Libreoffice could dream of having without having google or somebody throw a ton of money at it.

There are of course many projects that are disrupting office for certain use cases. Examples would be MediaWiki, Wordpress and google docs.