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To be fair that's partly because people aren't educated enough about computers. If someone's machine breaks they will call someone to fix it and 999 times out of 1000 that person will recommend installing office when the box is fixed. It doesn't matter to them cause the cost of the licence is paid for by the machines owner and its easy enough to download office at no cost.

OO/LO aren't any different to their office equivalents in terms of core usage. It's the same as IE, off the shelf machines came supplied with internet explorer for so many years that people simply don't know to change to a better alternative. Office has the same problem, people pay for a replacement because they simply don't know they can get the same program for free under a different name.

Things are slowly changing though, IE is the same as office when it comes to those third party plugins - webapps built yonks ago based on IE6 or whatever and they are just having to change now that there's better available.

Personally when I'm replacing home or office machines I install from an image with LO/firefox already present and configured. With links to googledocs if people really must use excel (for whatever reason).

It's like anything in life, you keep using something because it's easier than looking at doing something differnet. If Office has already been paid for, then you'd probably not see a compleling case to change it. For core functionality, Word 95 would probably do most home users.

The same is true of browsers, if you're happy with the browser you've got, you probably won't be bothered to change it. Admittely if sites stop to work altogether on older browsers, then you might be compelled to change. I can't say that one browsing experience for me is significantly better than another for the features I require for home use.

I would love to see you back that up with some hard facts? Bearing in mind that Microsoft do not have a policy allowing some parts of the world to have their products for free. And even if that was the case (which it isn't) the UK certainly would not be in said part of the world.

Iran is such a country. IIRC you can download software in Iran for nothing as long as the software wasn't produced by Iranian engineers and developed from within Iran itself. About a year or so back there was a leaked .gov.ir server that had thousands of programs available for download, except it was left open to access from any country Got closed within a few days.

Realistically it's a moral issue, there's simply no way for anyone to tell if Office has been paid for or not.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_copyright_issues

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez#Legality

The Home/student versions of office 2010 are quite reasonably priced nowdays, but you don't get Outlook included.

i have every edition of office made except 2011