Office Software

[Lynch, Jonathan]

Richard's earlier comment got me to wondering...

My use of Rev is for a few specialized situations, and I am largely
ignorant of the various office software programs out there. After he
mentioned OpenOffice I went online to read about it.

Apparently it is free for customers, although Sun paid like $60-million
for it! I looked up user comments on groups.google, and it seems that
OpenOffice is not quite as polished as MS Office, and probably will not
be serious competition for at least a few more development releases.
That seems kind of lame to me - I mean, for an investment of
$60-million, surely a competitive quality of software could be created?
But then again, I understand little about the software market.

I have two questions for the folks on this list experienced with both
writing and selling software:

1) Is it really that difficult to create basic office software? 

2) Why does it cost so much?