jonez, re: microsoft getting involved in an open source project. Not so surprising. Have you heard of the term "embrace and extend"? a good example of this is netscape 2 extensions to html. As soon as a major vendor adopts nonstandard extensions to any protocol, this creates a fork, which divides the community and can easily kill both prongs of the fork, like the BSDs in fact.
re: if MS office was available for linux, how many distros would include it. probably about as many as currently include realplayer, ie, a couple, but not many. On the other hand, you would be able to get ms office for just about every distro and everybody who wanted it would have it. Of course this won't happen, because MS can't see a way of making money on it, using existing distribution techniques. They know the bulk of linux users won't pay through the nose for microsoft office like their windoid sheep will. That's the real reason ms office isn't out on linux.
