Office suite wars
Sethdg, I think the outlook for WP deteriorated earlier, namely on the introduction of Windows GUI (i.e. 3.0/3.1). WP was late into making a right version, caused at least partly, as I understand it, by MS not giving Win code out early enough, and then MS pursuing extremely active marketing.
I agree that WP making a comeback are extremely low indeed for the reasons you have given, i.e. Word being the de facto standard and Open/Libre Office being a viable alternative. I wonder how big some other office suites I have seen mentioned here are.
Plus there is Google Docs. If you make that your master and just need a desktop suite to hold downloaded document copies then odt is sufficient. (But I have not tested the conversion capabilities as I do not have odt -- highly-formatted Word docs translate quite poorly into Google Docs but the other way round is not so bad, and should be getting better).
