> It's a constant race of keeping up with features, using mostly unpaid volunteer developers.

What new features are Microsoft bringing out that are that critical for LibreOffice et al to catch up with?

I can’t think of much which I use that wasn’t already available in Office 95 which was released 30 years ago.

Aside from OOXML (which isn’t nearly as open as the name suggests) and the ribbon bar (which i personally hate), there hasn’t really been any big innovations.

The only features I can think of are:

- better security model for marcos. But that was only needed because MS Office was insecure to begin with so not really relevant here either

- Unicode support

- more rows in excel (though generally once you start reaching that point, the memory footprint of Excel becomes too great to make working on that spreadsheet practical)

The real issue with LibreOffice isn’t new features. It’s the subtle rending and parsing quirks when working on OOXML documents. But that’s likely Microsoft’s fault and thus OOXML working as intended.

Excel had tons of new and useful features over the past years.