Microsoft is trying to move it's customers to a more lucrative licensing scheme. About two thirds are undecided or saying no forced march of upgraded by subscription.
Who knows? Maybe this is the shot in the arm that KOffice, StarOffice / OpenOffice and the Gnome office tools need to become a viable replacement to Microsoft Office. There have been years of development that have gone into those free/open source office tools already, and some of them are suitable for more than just the odd adventurous hacker now. Perhaps this will spur the next development push to make these viable office tools in five years' time.
Microsoft's wishful ever-expanding definition of "operating system" aside, the amount of software that the average user needs on a stock machine to make it useful is expanding over time. TCP/IP stacks used to be third-party addons (remember Trumpet Winsock? Wollongong TCP/IP for VMS?). Now, not only is that integrated, a computer without PPP, an email client and a modern browser these days is a doorstop. The same has been true for office software for a good long time now; most Intel boxes that ship with Windows also ship with some rudimentary form of MS Office (at least Word and Excel). It's also been true of servers -- shipping without a nameserver, DHCP daemon, web server and mail server ready to run is a travesty these days.
So office software really is part of a base system these days. It's part of the infrastructure. And like all infrastructure software, it's best left to open source.
