A slight diversion, but as there have been rumblings over the years about MS either deciding - or being forced - to seperate the OS from the application divisions, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that MS Office might be developed to run natively on Linux, in much the same way as it has done on the Mac for years.
Viewed as an independent business, MS applications division would be interested in selling as many licences of their product as possible - irrespective of which OS it is running on.
Some of the often-quoted reasons for companies and individuals choosing (validly) not to move to Linux on the desktop is the required investment in training in a different office suite, and the conversion and compatibility issues between open-source and MS versions of databases, WP, presentation and spreadsheet apps, with huge investments having being made in the MS file formats.
Well if MS were to release a native version that ensured document portability between Win / office and Linux / office it would very likely kill off the open source competitors just as it did with Novell and WordPerfect (OK, they aren't actually dead, just 99.99% dead!).
In the long run I bet it would actually outweigh the loss of OS revenue.
Just a thought.
SD
ps - I'm not saying that this would be a good thing
