Microsoft Office is as much of a monopoly as Windows. Some people may want to stay away from it for a variety of reasons ranging from a dislike of monopolies to excessive prices to having a lower probability of having your software in the crosshairs of many of the world's cyber badguys.
Most people never use a fraction of the functionality of Office. The main issue is that they need something that reliably reads and writes documents that are produced by their co-workers. Office software is usually bundled with new machines or part of a (generally expensive) licensing agreement with Microsoft.
Much has been written on Star Office and its relatives - perhaps you are using it if your company is seriously interested in saving money. As a Mac user there are other choices are the Open Office effort for Mac is still immature.
Last night I tried the demo of ThinkFree - a Java based office like suite for Windows, OS X and OS 9. It the same awful interface that Office has to keep most users happy and it does seem to read all of the word, powerpoint and excel documents I could throw at it. It is java based and performance isn't snappy, but it felt fine on my Ti Powerbook once it was up and running (dealing with huge spreadsheets or PP presentations may be another matter).
It should be noted that the rich functionality of Word is missing here. The Write module is basically a useful word processor that will read and write documents that can be used with Microsoft Word. I would guess that most people probably won't notice the feature difference, but power users will not be happy.
Generally I'm impressed. It is probably worth the $50 they're asking.
http://www.thinkfree.com/
I suspect this class of program will only improve with time as companies realize they can get the same work done (perhaps more if one counts the vulnerabilities of a dominant program to attacks) without paying Microsoft an annuity.
I would love to see a standards body define a set of office suite functions and certify programs that can handle them. Interoperability among all certified programs would be required for certification and features that invited hacking would be excluded. If a government or two (or some other large body) were to standardize on something like this we would see real competition.
6:12:33 AM 
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