unless I want to shell out hundreds of dollars for Office 2010. In what way was taking away from the program an improvement?
I'm amazed Microsoft isn't in bankruptcy yet.
Your first statement is the answer to your question. MS limited the functionality as a way of milking more money from customers ..
MS isn't in bankruptcy yet because it takes a LONG time to do that to a company that has billions of dollars of quarterly
PROFITS, has billions (trillions?) in assets. That is a huge amount of financial inertia. Give them a little time, they are working hard at it ... (ribbon, Metro/Win8, Surface ...) They just need a little more practice ...