I just received some interesting news:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

What do you think?

The name sounds stupid! But after all the annoying licensing questions of the Sun -> Oracle acquisition one can be happy that the open source community found a quick solution.

Well, Libre is french and means...yes, open or free. But OpennOffice sounds still better

LibreOffice is "just" a fork of OpenOffice.
Depending on the use-case one or the other might be more suited. But thats for everyone to decide.

Instead of confusing customers with forks, renaming and
"new stable" version of a 10 year old software, they
should concentrate on making a 100% compatability to the
old .doc and Excel formats.

This is what Endusers want.
Something that can be used as alternative to Microsoft Office,
that really imports and exports documents 100% correctly.

Ultimately I thing it defines to 50% if businesses decide to move
to a Linux Distro, if this single point (Office compatability)
functions correctly.

You could try Lotus Symphony, as well

Why not get rid of the office part and keep open? It's not compatible to microsoft's office applications anyway .

Because most businesses use the .doc and Excel format for correspondence.

Therefore you require to be able to handle them.
The price for the license is secondary in that regard.

So if you want people to switch the Office suite, you need to provide compatability.

Well compatibility is increasing with each and every release. The problem is that lots of things are trial & error & guessing to figure out how Microsoft did things...

I switched to Open Office years ago and am happy with it - recently even exchanges with Microsoft Office users worked out in the end...

For people in the academic field (university etc.) .doc plays a negligible role. Powerpoint is still in use, though, and I must admit that Impress is inferior in many ways.