The font rendering is a dealbreaker for me. I have to use Word periodically for exchanging files with customers where we have zero say in the mechanism. That is, when they say "here's our version of the contract for review before we give you $$$", and it's in Word that doesn't open cleanly in something better like Pages or Google Docs (yeah, I said it and I meant it), then Word it is.

I can't stand using it a moment longer than I have to, and never, ever use it for anything other than this kind of legacy doc compatibility situation. The font rendering is so, so bad that I just can't look at it. If MS ever cared to fix it then I bet that could move their Mac adoption by at least a few percent, which would work out to a nice chunk of change at their scale. But alas, no. We get stuck with something that looks like they took a photo of an LCD calculator screen and downscaled it.

> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons

In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.

That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.

As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.