
Too little, too late
When OpenOffice "exploded" most people who were actively using it have already moved on. Either to LibreOffice or MS Office. And from what I can tell so have most developers.
So I really wonder if this is a good move for Apache.
Then on the other hand; I also think that in order to setup a project as complex as a whole office suite the first thing you need is strict regulations. I haven't participated on LibreOffice so I don't speak from experience but knowing how Sun was very lenient towards developers one has to wonder why many developments on OpenOffice were rejected by Sun yet embraced by LibreOffice.
Still... Whether its OpenOffice or LibreOffice I still think both of them have a lot of work to do if they wish to compete with MS Office. I'm not saying that these projects are no good or anything, - far - from it. But to me the saying "you get what you pay for" fully applies here.
While both office suites have many advantages and are perfectly suitable for common tasks (Writer for writing a letter, using Calc to setup your expenses, etc.) it is my experience that as soon as you want more out of them they start to become much harder to use than they should be (from an end user point of view that is).
When I started to play with MS Office 2010 (after having used OpenOffice for 5 - 6 years) the first thing which totally baffled me was the ease in which I could setup my own entry forms in Word. Immediately followed by the easy interaction between all Office applications (in all fairness; this is also due to the underlying Windows OS. Stuff like OLE, COM applications, etc.).
It was one of the main reasons I switched to MS even though this cost me money. While my OO setup was perfectly usable (I spent quite some time setting up entry forms on Writer) my fingers always itched to expand on it. But the main problem there was time and effort; programming entry forms /without/ so much as a visual editor is no fun.