20 years ago there was exactly one multiplatform office suite, and if you think StarOffice was better than the current incarnation of Google Apps I'm not sure how to respond to that outside of laughter.
I also kind of question whether or not a web-based office suite is truly multiplatform. For the most part, it doesn't interact with my desktop so it's really a single platform.
It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.
Is the web browser the best technology to achieve "multiplatform" for an office suite? It makes sense from a purely practical sense but technologically it's pretty terrible.
I wrote pivot table functionality in XSLT and XML for IE6. Pretty much 10 years ago. It's not that you couldn't do it, it was that it wasn't worth it.
Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc.
I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser.
And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.
