Will Microsoft Office 2007 Drive Users to Open Office?

lazyron, on Slashdot, observes that Microsoft Office 2007 is such a departure from previous editions that Open Office now seems the more familiar alternative.  Indeed, David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times, is enthusiastic about Microsoft Office 2007 but notes that "Word, Excel and PowerPoint are almost entirely new programs." "[T]his Office" he adds "bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed.  Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play the free bonus game called Find the Feature."  Although Pogue judges that the effort will ultimately worth it he does say that "switching will be a headache for Office veterans for weeks."

Faced with the prospect of tackling Microsoft Office 2007* many users may opt to move to OpenOffice.org; it will feel quite familiar to users of Microsoft Office prior to the 2007 version, it is well documented and it's free.

*Note to Firefox users:  Microsoft seems to have designed the paged linked to so that it doesn't render legibly with the Gecko engine; if you have the "View in IE Tab" extension you'll want to use it for this page.  Isn't Microsoft cute?