'No Office 14 this year,' says Ballmer Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has confirmed that the company’s upcoming Office package, codenamed 14, won’t land in 2009. He told Wall Street analysts at Redmond’s annual “Strategic Update” briefing today that the Office suite “will not be [shipped] this year.” Just last month Microsoft spun out an Alpha version of the server …
Its painful enough for firms to switch Office versions every 5+ years, most home users are happy with any version that will create a simple letter and spellcheck it.
I still know plenty of folks on office97/2000. I bought office07 last year and had to 'retard it' as most other folks I know that use Office thought I was Buck Rodgers from the 25th Century.
Does MS actually make any money on Office? Other then the home user copy I bought last year obviously.
Is it just me or is there a general groundswell of feeling to the effect that 2010 is actually in this decade? This would be correct if decades only get brought forward a year once you can start referring to them by reference to the number in the tens column (i.e. once you get to the twenties), so that in each century
(i) the first decade is the years '01 to '10 and the second is the years '11 to '20, in accordance with the general principle that things that come in tens get numbered 1 to 10 rather than the bonkers "0 to 9" idea propounded by all those charmingly impatient people who celebrated the turn of the millennium a year early,
(ii) the year ending 20 is both the last year of the second decade in accordance with (i) above and also the first year of the third decade (being the twenties), and
(iii) the year ending 00 inhabits no decade at all because the last decade of the previous century was the nineties and the first decade of the centruy at hand comprises the years '01 to '10 in accordance with (i) above.
Maybe they can't think of anything to put in it? Whilst I dare say there is a small customer base for every part of Office, the universal stuff is the Word/Excel/Outlook core. MS ran out of new ideas for those products about a decade ago, and the code is probably thoroughly sclerotic C from the late 80s and early 90s, so it wouldn't even be possible to give it much of a facelift.
Not that this is a problem. After the ribbon, I expect another revamp is the *last* thing long-time Office users actually want.
Do people want yet a more integrated, complicated, bloated piece of officeware? I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest that more than 90% of users use less than 10% of Word, never mind the other products.
Look around your offices and tell me (honestly) how many people even use things like Table of Contents..? Other than the nerdiest of the nerdy, who's ever used Show Changes in a meaningful way?
Better off without it.
During the current decade, Ive found Microsoft Orifice get progressively worse as years go by, 2007 defining the pinnacle of Microsoft crappyness by changing the default file format amongst other annoying tendencies all connected to the utterly meaningless, useless OOMXL format & nothing to do with productivity.
Orifice 2003 was just annoying, to me that is, others may have loved it, but those wonderful defects such as crashing just before you could click save (& buggering up the backup copy as well) with the last gasp of: Try freeing up some disk or memory space knowing that you had half a terrabyte free & 2gbs of ram are just plain daft. It seemed like every button had an ulterior motive in some hidden subroutine. The only gem in Orifices badly polished collection of baubles was the one that got the least attention & that was Access.
However I find Office 2000 more than adequate for my modest needs on the diminishing occasions that I have to use a PC.
Writing reports, business cases, specifications, contracts and such like in a big corporate features like table of contents and show changes get a lot of use. However - they worked well enough in Office 97 and haven't really moved on a whole lot to 2007. My experience of Word 2007 is that it was a bottom up redesign aimed at people who had never used an office app before which doesn't make a lot of sense when you own (nearly) the whole market already. One of the most important features for corporates sharing docs is Styles but no-one ever seems to know how to use them and every time MS change them they break everything that's gone before.
Excel 07 has vastly simpler to use Pivot Tables (again I use them frequently) but they've also added functionality which means 07 pivot tables don't work with earlier versions (nor i think with the latest version of Mac Office which i also use).
I've never understood the certainty that some people have in stating that 2000 was the last year of the 20th century etc etc.
In fact, the first year of the Christian era started at 4, not 1. And many other error corrections have resulted in years going walkabout over the millennia. So if we want 2010 to be the start of the next decade it's as valid as any argument you can come up with.
And speaking of these early days, who needs Office 14 - stone tablets are probably less bloated.
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