I have the impression that OpenOffice is still busy with cleaning up the code inherited (and e.g. porting to GTK2 and such things). Given the screenshots posted in the much respected Office UI blog by Jensen Harris, I think OpenOffice will run into trouble when Microsoft actually releases their new Office.

Microsoft seems to have a really neat and productive UI there - there is only one thing really wrong with it: it's completely different than anything else people are used to (and people have learned to use).

While there will obviously be migration issues, companies will probably delay switching to the new office to save licensing costs and such things, marketing people will be all crazy about the new features in there.

You might remember the research with the aggressive title "PowerPoint makes you stupid"... actually this will become even more true with the new Office, I fear.

It comes with default styles for common diagrams used in presentations, like a flow sequence or a circle sequence. While these aren't particularly smart things, they'll be presented even more prominently (because the gfx is so great), and the actual contents will probably be pushed back even further...

Anyway, these new styles look really hip, so people will be eager to use them. And use them. And use them again. And use them really big (eventually forgetting about the contents behind them)... and OpenOffice can't keep up with that so far.

Maybe OpenOffice needs a huge scale UI contest. Maybe with some abstraction scheme to be able to run different UIs on the same engine. OpenOffice in particular should try to become a technology leader, and not just try to copy Microsoft as much as possible... the UI changes in Impress are said to be pretty similar to what people expected when they think PowerPoint.

There are good reasons to stick with the established UI standards (even when that might mean 'cloning' the UI) since that keeps migration costs low. But I think it's a pity OpenOffice can't show many large technological improvements to put more pressure on Microsoft.

Ah, and yes, I guess many people at OOo are well aware of that, and like so many projects (commercial ones probably even more than FLOSS) they're just short on development resources...