Can Open Office and/or Google Apps access OLAP datastores as well as Excel can SSAS? Do either versions of their word processor have programmability layers so we can develop workflows directly in our office documents?

Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some incredible stuff integrating Pivot, Silverlight, and Sharepoint. Sure it's enterprise and not Web 2.0 social web, but its the type of stuff that makes CIO cough up millions of dollars.

We've looked at Open Office and Google Apps in years past and they were literally at MS Office 2000 level. If all you want to do is write a memo, Word, OpenOffice, GoogleDocs, or Notepad will work fine.

When you're in a real enterprise with real enterprise needs, the features in Office that you think no one uses, are a huge win businesses. And once you're using Office, BizTalk and Sharepoint just bring everything together.

And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used.

We should be clear. Windows has never been the only OS choice. IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance. And while pundits, who generally aren't in the enterprise, think that world can move away from Office. I think just the opposite. The new features, that aren't of general use to Joe Schmoe, make it more invaluable for the enterprise.