Fundamentally, if you have the wrong technical solution and it makes it difficult or awkward for teachers to take it up they won't waste the time and effort. If it is easy they still might not but there is at least a chance that they will. Your market should drive your tech development.
Ian does raise an interesting point. From my experience, part of the reason schools have been slow to adopt OpenOffice.org is because the IT staff either:
a) aren't familiar enough with OpenOffice.org and do not wish to attempt installing and supporting the software, or
b) the IT staff have a bias against OpenOffice.org, and no matter how much support there is for OpenOffice.org from teachers, it is extremely difficult for them to adopt it when their IT department has an official Not Supported status assigned to it.
An online version certainly wouldn't be a trivial task, as Ian mentioned. But an online version would, at least based on my observations here in the USA, open the salvos for teachers to use OpenOffice.org if they desire to do so. After all, in such a case, it wouldn't matter what IT thought in terms of supporting OpenOffice.org - if they didn't have to load any software, teachers interested in using OpenOffice.org in the classroom could go ahead and give it a shot without the blessings of IT.
With that being said, I do think the situation is getting better in regards to the perception of OpenOffice.org by IT staff in academia. And I still support the fundamental goals of OOo4Kids. But from personal experience, I also know that there is still a fair amount of bias again OpenOffice.org by IT staff, no matter the desires by teachers to use it. An online version could certainly be a viable solution for that particular problem.
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