There are a number of office suites out there and for just about every platform. The front runner(s) for the PC is MicroSoft Office; for the Mac it’s Microsoft Office and iWork; for Linux it’s [Apache] OpenOffice.I have used OO since before it was Sun’s OpenOffice. Even when Sun held the property there was a commercial and a community edition. (I paid for the commercial version once) I stopped following OO about the same time as I purchased my first Mac. Support was limited and the UI was consistant with the PC and Linux version but not my newly adopted Mac UI.One of the things that makes OO possible is it’s use of Java and that the JVM is available on so many platforms. But while the JVM has been getting better and faster it is still slower than native applications in the same space. For one thing the office suite functionality is ever increasing and in order to be a meme the developers have to add code and so it gets bigger and clunkier.And unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last twenty to thirty years; the people who know say that we only use a small fraction of it’s features. To say that we seem to be collecting or hoarding features for the on day that we might actually need it is distasteful to say the least.Back in the day when MicroSoft Word and WordPerfect were taking the PC industry by storm… and IBM’s typewriter business was slowly dissolving… IBM acquired a suite of DOS based integrated office tools that included a simple database, spreadsheet, and word processor. One nice thing was they could be integrated so that things like mailing lists and mail-merge were possible. The idea was simple. Take the 50-75% of the features that most people really use and implement them well. (see IBM writing assistant - Google Search http://bit.ly/JZdpB3)So as Apache releases a new version of OpenOffice I’m thinking back to the days when having a distraction free, simple, and true word processor meant something.