[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.