The free open source productivity suite OpenOffice is the absolute worst Windows Vista application. Still, I would like to underline that mine is a subjective position, based on the statistics compiled by the Windows Error Reporting service. According to the error monitoring infrastructure in Vista, OpenOffice 2.2 crashed or became unresponsive no less than 49 times in the past three months. For your viewing pleasure, only I have managed to integrate two screenshots detailing the OpenOffice 2.2 errors in my copy of Windows Vista Business. Now, while it is obvious that an application that crashes or stops working 49 times in three months is far from a healthy level of quality standards, OpenOffice is also open source and free. But free for a reason, because you get every dollar's worth...

Now OpenOffice is more than sufficient for my everyday work. The fact that I consider it deeply inferior to the Office 2007 System, or even to Office 2003 means absolutely nothing. I can deal with 50 crashes in three months because I take it as the hidden price associated with the free label. It does impact my workflow, but on the other hand, I must applaud the excellent recovery infrastructure of OpenOffice. Not even one of the 50 crashes actually made me lose any significant amount of data. The recovery mechanism works near to perfection and in a matter of minutes I was always back at work. At the same time, Office 2007 is not free. With the exception of the free 60-day trial that you can download and test drive.

But the matter is another altogether. There are a lot of solutions presented as alternatives to Microsoft's Office productivity suite. Recently, in addition to the launch of OpenOffice 2.3 (I'll upgrade by the end of the week and let you know if it runs into the same problems as version 2.2) Google made available StarOffice (Java included) via Google Pack in addition to Presentations on top of Google