Ersatz Office

We certainly have a whole spectrum of reverse-engineered knock-offs of Microsoft Office. It would be nice if someone did something original. It's a sad fact that the most creative new office software is still MS Office. Their 2007 product had a lot of new ideas, some good, some not so good, but at least they are innovating.

People talk about Microsoft doing "Embrace and Extend". But everyone else seems to do "Daemonize but Duplicate". Trivially adapt their office formats, without doing any of the R&D that Microsoft did (e.g. ODF), then bash Microsoft and try to get governments to ban their format.

Not that I am an admirer of Microsoft's business tactics, but I don't buy the idea that Google or the open-source companies are altruistic.