How does a company that sells a powerful software package like MS Office survive when others offer a free equivalent package? Firstly, the biggest cost is never the licence cost.

How does a company that sells a powerful software package like MS Office survive when others offer a free equivalent package?
Firstly, the biggest cost is never the licence cost.

I tried to introduce OpenOffice about 5–10 years ago to a company where I was CTO.

The economics worked out roughly as follows:

MS Office licence - £80
MS Office to OpenOffice training course - £400
Pretty much all our staff were already very, very experienced in Excel.

Secondly, for anything complex, there are not free equivalents

If you want to knock up a quick letter, sure…

… if you want a basic spreadsheet to add 100 numbers, sure…

… if you want to calculate the FVSCHEDULE, then that's a very, very, recent addition to things that aren't called Excel.