Some interesting quotes from someone who at least claims to have worked on Mac Office 2004 from a Silicon post from here:

I love open source software, but frankly, the OSS community is going down a dead-end road with the OpenOffice clones. Let's say that we could wave a wand and complete all the work on all the Office clones today. What would we have?

About a dozen clones of Office 97 for Windows, with all the same features and the ability to emit XML. Do I really need to say that this is a less-than-attractive alternative to Mac Office? What good is an alternative to Office if it's not *better* than Office?

In my not-at-all-humble opinion, the OSS community needs to do is to IMMEDIATELY stop work on the code derived from the StarOffice project, and start work on a *modern* business software suite. Salvage only the code that involves file format compatibility with Microsoft Office and throw the rest away. If you want an alternative to Gates and Ballmer, BE an alternative to Gates and Ballmer.

As Steve Jobs once said, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

More interesting jive in there. An interesting read. Search for "Disclaimer" in the page to find this post.

Personally I haven't seen a need to upgrade Office since I got the "iMac/iBook edition of Word 98", which still runs reasonably well in Classic. The only place I need more is where someone with Office 2000+ sends me a file in an "updated format". Seriously, to take that guy's spin and spin it onto its head, what does Word 2004 (I've admittedly never been an Office fan past Word and possibly Excel (unless you count Visio)) give me that I wasn't getting in Word 98 -- and that I absolutely need?

Well, heck, guess I'll post that to this page and see if someone has a good answer....