In my experience, I only ever get crashes with LibreOffice. I can't honestly remember a MS Office crash for me since the 2003 version.

Are people honestly getting regular office suite crashes?

Ever tried getting word docs into Indesign without converting to RTF as an interim step? This may not be a MS problem and may be Adobes fault, but whenever I get a .doc, importing into indesign directly makes my life miserable for too often. Even if it doesn't crash Indesign, it often causes strange behaviour and bizarre formatting issues. Between that and the damn paper clip wizard man of old, my Office suite tolerance is about zero. But LibreOffice, ouch. After this last week, one more 'java update required' popup and I might start crying. I DID IT 1 MINUTE AGO.

(for the record, my point was that if people expect bad software, ....that's a problem)

Aside from Linux, you mean?

Sorry, yeah I've been using W7 since beta and now W8. I don't know what kind of crashes happen on Linux with office software.

Linux user. LibreOffice on linux....feels like it's been getting better. It doesn't crash "very much" any more, maybe once every two months for me.

I don't use MS Office on windows much, so I can't comment on its stability.