In an office setting (I'm not saying enterprise, as that would be asking too much), you make use of a word processor, a spreadsheet, maybe an email client, maybe a presentation thing.
iWork does okay in this sort of setting. In enterprise there is zero competition for MS Office though. The main hangups are Excel and Outlook (not email, but large group collaboration). Document writing (Word) and presentations (Powerpoint) have mostly been figured out and passed by in some cases.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
I've tried StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs, Abiword, WordPerfect, and every other option available. Nothing comes close to Word in functionality. Sure you can write a few paragraphs and do rich text in any of those options, but if you're doing anything at all complicated you need more.
And yet LibreOffice Calc works as well as Excel in almost every way that I've used it.
And Outlook...I don't know a sysadmin who doesn't hate Outlook or (especially) Exchange. It's true, though, that no one else really has that functionality together in a reasonable package. Talk about a vulnerable product to target, though; I guess GMail is trying to take it down, though I would have a hard time trusting Google to manage all of my email. Nothing against Google, but their tech-support is practically nonexistent, so if there WERE a problem, there's no recourse.
Wow, my experience as been the reverse with regard to Excel and Word.
And you've hit on the main problem with replacing Office. Everyone seems to use 10 different features from each application and those features don't seem to overlap. When I write documents I generally need something simple so my feature set for a writer is simple and mostly covered.
OTOH, I use a lot of Excel features that simply don't exist in other products. A big one used to be pivot tables, but those have been replicated somewhat. The problem is that Excel moved the bar further by adding more features like essentially being a window into MSAS and allowing users to build pivot tables and reports directly from data housed in MSAS.
And yeah, Exchange is a PITA to manage (it has gotten better, 5.5 was a nightmare), but it's still the best group collaboration, email, calendaring, scheduling, whatever else it does platform out there.
Google Apps customers (i.e. people who are replacing Exchange with gmail) have access to tech support for Gmail. The folks who respond are pretty good (as tech support folks go).
iWork does okay in this sort of setting. In enterprise there is zero competition for MS Office though. The main hangups are Excel and Outlook (not email, but large group collaboration). Document writing (Word) and presentations (Powerpoint) have mostly been figured out and passed by in some cases.