Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy? Microsoft Office earned $4.2 billion revenue in the first three months of 2010, only a little behind the Windows client at $4.4 billion, according to the company's most recent earnings release. The figures show the suite remains deeply embedded in the business world, despite the availability of free or much cheaper …
Are "lock-ins and document format changes/obfuscation" honestly put forth as "competing with free?" It seems to me that this is best classified as "desperately preventing competition." Unless my grasp of the English language fails me, "competition" would enable a) better price, b) better features, or c) increased convenience compared to other offering similar products.
It seems that Microsoft is not really doing any of these things, but rather is leveraging it’s existing near-monopolies in various areas in a combined fashion in order to maintain it’s near-monopolies in those same various areas. I suppose looked at through the right filers, the cross integration could be viewed as “increased convenience,” but I personally think that’s stretching it a little. The reason I make that statement has to do with changes like the Ribbon bar. The Ribbon bar could well be viewed as an “increased convenience” feature, if only the original features has remained an option. Instead, by making it a mandatory feature, they are locking new users into by getting them familiar with their interface in the hopes that they will then reject more traditional ones. For that matter, cross integration would things like Sharepoint could be viewed as competitive, if only others were even able to compete. Where are the APIs allowing the construction of a Sharepoint-like product by competitors?
I realise that antitrust, monopolies and competition are touchy areas, (especially amongst USians,) however I just can’t see Microsoft’s perpetual “mandatory changes” as anything other than lock in. If you upgrade one application to get a feature you want, you will be forced into upgrading them all; an expensive proposition to say the least.
Anyway, that was ranty and probably incoherent: I just wanted to bitch about the idea that Microsoft “competes with free.” They don’t. I’m going to get coffee now…hey, thanks for my coat…
Anyone who thinks Excel Sparklines have any basis in the real world is getting paid to write crap, I love your penultimate sentence; missing whole words suggests a gin session the night before, I guess they don't pay you enough and can't afford a proof reader; explains the quality.
"Microsoft will be offering Office Starter, a basic edition of Office 2010 supported by advertising,"
Not a bad idea. It certainly puts a dent in the single biggest argument for OpenOffice. Being a Linux geek I'm not going to be switching back to MS Office anytime soon (or, probably, ever), but it's good to see Microsoft is realizing that their monopoly isn't secure enough to gouge people mercilessly anymore.
Open Office kicks the pants off the MSOffice, having used both I have been delighted by the ability of OO to write 200 page technical reports on, something MSOffice (2000 and 1997 versions) more often than not cached and corrupted my report files....crap. Another bonus OO maintains a wonderful stability of formats across the versions, ODF compliance makes it a delight for document archival....also I have used Google Docs for lightweight work and its is really good for collaboration, it show great promise, much better than Sharepoint.
..we haven't rolled 2k10 out in the workplace yet but I've been doing 'development stuff' with it for a while and it is an improvement over 2k7. It's kinda like the whole Windows thing. XP->Vista->Win7 only here it's Office 2k7 that was the dog.
The ribbon is a PITA but in Office2k10 you can customise it down to one tab with just what you want on it. The end result is that it's similar in size and function to Office 2k3. They've also finally got Office 2k10 to respect your system settings for Clear Type so that's one abomination finally cast back into the nether regions of hell where it belongs. One or two features of 2k10 that sound lame (like built in screen capture) actually turn out to be quite handy.
It's still not a quantum leap and I still don't see the point for home use but if your employer currently foists Office on you then look forward to 2k10. I would actually class it as a worthy successor to Office 2k3 and hopefully it will blot out my memories of 2k7.
Everyone that I know at university is hating Office 2007 because of the ribbon. Even I am having problems finding things. Ever since the ribbon scores of students here have turned into Office newbies and are hating it. I have seen productivity go right down. However, the university had to upgrade to Office 2007 because of their licensing deal with Microsoft. I write everything with limited formatting, then at home, I have Word 2003 and have been using that to format my documents while remembering to save things in Word 2003 format at uni.
"Everyone that I know at university is hating Office 2007 because of the ribbon. Even I am having problems finding things. Ever since the ribbon scores of students here have turned into Office newbies and are hating it. I have seen productivity go right down."
It wouldn't be down to the subsidised beer and 20 minutes of lectures a day would it?! Given the quality of the English displayed in your diatribe, you may wish to stay at Uni a while longer!
In the enterprise this stuff has it's feet so far under the table it's generally only ever a question of "which version shall we run". Don't forget that no matter what business it is, in the enterprise there's normally always a "lorry load of shit written in VBA" kicking around somewhere.
I'm using 2000 for the same reason, so I guess I bought my licence a year or two after you did.
As a developer though, I've evaluated all the versions since '95 and I'd have to say that although there have been few (if any) must have features in the last 15 years, there was a marked rise in implementation quality in the first half of that period. '95 was a fairly buggy implementation of the feature set, and '97 was a worthwhile upgrade just for the fixes. 2000 was less so but probably gets the nod. 2002 and 2003 are almost indistinguishable from one another and only marginally better than 2000. Neither made sense as an upgrade.
2007 was just a whole new kettle of fish and probably a retrograde step if you were an existing user. The saving grace on the user interface is that the 2003 commands are all still available if you know the (2003) keyboard shortcut, so you can probably ignore the ribbon altogether. Dunno how new users cope, mind.
Functionally, however it's OLE support is actually worse than 2003s and the exact bug set differs with the file format you choose. (MS had not fixed this in the 2010 beta, btw.) For long-time power users with documents exploiting OLE linking, that might be quite annoying.
Outlook is the killer app in Office, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure where the "bewildering interface" comment comes from, but, for contrast, try using Lotus Notes, Outlook's major competitor--*then* you'll see bewildering (and utter shite). (And, for the Linux geeks, Outlook != Outlook Express, the default email client which shipped with XP.) If you don't have Exchange, Outlook is great; if you do have Exchange, then Outlook is its essential counterpart. OL 2010 seems pretty sweet, with a snappier UI and better Sharepoint integration, although I'm not sold on the ribbon. But hey, at least they brought back the File menu!
For other corporate number crunching types, Excel is the killer app. There are other spreadsheets that compete on 90% of the functionality, but when you need that extra 10%, you really need it.
All that said, I suspect that what's going to hook people into Office 2010 is the enhanced Sharepoint integration. I don't love Sharepoint, but there are plenty who do, and being able to publish and collaborate in a simpler fashion will definitely get some attention. I do appreciate that Microsoft seems to have put some serious effort into shrinking the office bloat and making the suite faster and easier to use, so I'll probably upgrade eventually.
Simply as an IMAP/POP3 client, it's pretty poor versus other (including webmail) options. It's great as an exchange client. The rest of the suite is great, I've been testing it since it popped up on TechNet the other day, I even like the modified ribbon! Anyway, I thought that it was only mactards that were supposed to be tetchy about criticism, or does that extend to Microsoft fanbois too?
I must say hated the ribbon to start with but got used to it now, took me a week maybe. It all looks much better but prefer substance from design. Sharepoint love it, so that's probably the main advantage with office 2010. I am not convinced on the cloud yet, it has to be slower by design and what happens if no internet connection or very slow internet? No work? Thinking about it maybe we should use the cloud!!
Yes, I really want to use an office suite which *requires* me to have a 'net connection running (sapping power from my battery) to a server I hope is up, located in a country god-knows-where, where the LEOs (or a narky BOFH) can have access to my files based on *their* local laws, not mine.
Yeah, I *really* want that.
On the other hand, I admit I use MS Office 2003. Why? I regularly try out new versions of OO, but so far no version has given me "normal view" a-la MS Office. OO seems to be stuck in Layout view - which may be *your* cup of tea, but I only use Layout view when finalising (laying out) my documents, not when writing the bulk of it (when I don't care if my layout is exactly right). My requirements, YMMV, but it means OO is a non-starter for me.
After many very happy years with nothing but Open Office, I was asked to submit something in Word, nothing but Word, and I mean .doc, not even .rtf, so I had to buy {shudder} Office for Home.
After going online for help to do anything for a few days, I mastered the basics and got my document off, then went back to OO with teas of gratitude. It's better, lighter, more intuitive, doesn't assume I want to do something that I probably don't -- a joy. I'll keep my cheapo MS Office 'suite' around for those who can't cope with something better, but it will turn into rust before I use it voluntarily. Upgrading? Office 2010? Ha ha ha ha ha ha etc.
Because tables and graphics frequently do NOT play nicely. When you have to spend a day tinkering with an 80 page report just to get it correctly formatted, you eventually get beaten into submission. Don't get me wrong - I'm with the OP. Open Office is lighter, more intuitive (or familiar) and I'd gladly tell people that I submit my work according to open standards. Except that if I want to get paid, then there are times when compromise is necessary.
With the impending severe budgetary constraints being imposed on the Public Sector I suspect there will be a new found enthusiasm for freely available alternatives to MS Office / Windows.
You can split hairs about the differences or disadvantages but the fact is Ubuntu, Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird etc enable users to be just as productive as when using proprietry software without the cost of the license fees.
LMFAO.
Excel and Access are the biggest software problems in our organisation. It's impossible to manage data properly with lots of cr@ppy spreadsheets and personal databases scattered around. And anyone whos has ever tried to debug a model for something created in a spreadsheet will surely agree that they are a bad bad idea.
"It's impossible to manage data properly with lots of cr@ppy spreadsheets and personal databases scattered around. "
True. The recent fun El Reg has had when the Welsh cops sent them their CRB database bing a nice case in point. However that is not *really* an Excel problem, it's a data *management* problem or rather its a data source problem. Of course teaching uses to build spread sheet models with up to date data would require a)education time and budget b) Users learning some *discipline* not something these "creative" thinking types take kindly to.
"And anyone whos has ever tried to debug a model for something created in a spreadsheet will surely agree that they are a bad bad idea."
Do you know you can *name* cells and regions? It's clumsy but can be done and meaningful names make quite a difference, *provided* people are willing to do so. A utility which allowed you to add separate names to a bunch of cells at the *same* time, then rename *all* references to them, would be pretty handy. Sounds like it *should* have been written years ago, but I've not seen it.
1. What's bewildering about Outlook's interface? Always been logical to me, over a whole bunch of other email clients.
2. I don't see mention of anything other than a single Excel feature being worthy of the upgrade. That good huh? Our org will be sticking with 2003 I suspect, despite having an OVS.
I Quite agree on both counts. Outlook was the first MS product I used because I wanted to rather than because I had to. As other products (e.g. Excel, Access, Powerpoint) improved I found myself using them as well although I agree that 2003 is when they plateaued and really, not much useful has been added since Office97 , and NOTHING that I've seen, (save for Excel's extra rows..., and maybe Outlook's folder searches) in Office2007 seems very useful to me.
OpenOffice provides a fine substitute for the dreaded Word, and the along with the other components gives me at least 95% of what I'd use Excel, PowerPoint, ... for, but when it comes to a personal information manager nicely integrated with an email client, which BTW syncs to my mobile devices with cheap or free add on software... well, what's not to like?
As a unix / linux command line dinosaur I don't often defend Microsoft, but when it comes to Outlook, it's best-of-breed IMHO.
As the owner of a small business who was reluctantly thinking of upgrading Office 2000, I have to say that the functionality of Open Office is perfectly adequate for my needs.
I'm not going to state that it is usable on a trading floor with high speed data add-ins - which probably don't exist - but for 95% of people the free option is perfectly workable.
Unfortunately MS Office seems to exclusively taught in schools.
I work for a school district and I've been pushing OOo as a way to save money for years. To put this in perspective, we spend around $100k/year on Office licenses. That's $100k every year that could be spent on something else, but the higher ups in the district have the mentality that free software is inherently bad software and won't go for it.
I used to used Open Office Calc as a spreadsheet but have gone back to Excel. OpenOffice Calc has all the features that most users would need but the more I used OO, the more Excel showed itself to be a much better engineered product. In particular, the display of rounded small&large numbers was not as precise as excel and the performance of the product rapidly detererates with large data sets.
I want to use open source software but in this case it falls short when I need to get work done.
"the drag-and-drop Customize dialog in Office 2003 and earlier is better than the ugly Customize Ribbon dialog in Office 2010"
I haven't used said feature of 2007, but I find it hard to believe the customise menu dialog could be uglier. It is functional in 2003 (and I don't think it changed any since about 95/97), but pretty it ain't.
I was at a 2010 pre-launch roadshow a couple of weeks ago and if I found the 'Backstage'/File menu slighly confusing, then what are non-techies going to think? In all their extensive usability labs, did they not get anyone screaming "WHERE'D MY DOCUMENT GO!!!"
I work for a really large company - the kind that Microsoft are trying so hard to bring with them - and we have only just migrated to Office 2007 (with all the crap that entails).
I can understand the pressure that Microsoft must feel to keep pushing out new versions of office but the point made in the article is spot on. Most business & office users have no real need for the Office 2010 upgrade (or even the 2007 version) unless you just want prettier charts. The Office '97 product contained probably 99% of all the functions that business users need, and even included properly working versions of some functions (like styles) which have been ruined in the more recent versions.
All those little toys that the media get so excited about are mostly irrelevant to the people who actually buy & use the product as a job (rather than as a review subject. But fortunately those reviews only highlight how MS has reached the point where there is little of value which can be added to these products. They're just into fiddling with them now just for the sake of it. The endless 'performance and usability improvements' claimed are often more than offset by the increasing complexity, bloat, confusion, training, errors and transition effort required to move onto the new products.
Microsoft would probably do better to produce some vastly simplified versions of some of these products at a lower price point (Office 'lite') but which isn't a piece of shit like Works.
Yes - the never ending circus of perpetual tricks and sleights of hand....
I dunno - I have been a vitriolic endorsee of Open Orifice, despite some PARTICULARLY stupid things like having break links to images pasted into documents - lest the images be removed from the source - and the document magically has none;
Along with their totally shit mindset on not embedding fonts - even tho I have about 2000 of them from all my applications and the web freebee's; so as soon as my magical artwork is separated from the PC it's produced on, the fonts, their layout and modifications go with it - and the Rasterfarian font in 330 point becomes Times New Roman 12 point.
Along with all the hassles of pasting in webpages to an ODT (odf?) write document... (fucking idiots)
But going back to my OLD windoze machine with the WORD 2000 - I am really pleased to be free of the open source crowd and their total fuckwit mindset of, "Oh no we can't allow you to embed your own fonts that you own in your own documents produced in OO Writer / Draw etc"
But in having TRIED Office 07 - well that lasted about 1 week... and went into the bin.
The never ending Microsoft wankfest of tiered products - from "Clueless, basic, home, home office, professional, enterprise, interstellar etc" - and the less than a million dollars a unit versions lacking all the technical files to fix up the idiot problems and protocols that they are infested with.
To me the perpetual microsoft upgrade cycle is for the most part - nothing more than the same crap repackaged and fiddled with - and then relaunched.
Kind of like passing a truck filled with cattle and having ones car covered in cow shit..
Then MS creatively markets it as the "Organic Office", or with a new coat of paint, "Organic office professional" and then they stick on a shiny plastic lady with wings from a trophy on the bonnet, and they call it "The Enterprise version of Organic Office".....
When all these lying snake oil salesmen are selling is the same old car with a few cosmetic changes.
"Yessss - lets milk this town of hicks with our miracle cures and then fuck off and come back when they have forgotten our last visit".
Oh No... not poor little clippy, tears running down the face. sigh.
On a more serious note, Our company weened ourselves from all of the treachery of Microsoft many years ago. It is with that in mind that I suggest that anyone who believes in actual standards, that yield positive control of all of their documents, take a serious look at were OpenOffice is today. It is very good and it does the .doc if you really need to be obsolete in your "documents'.
ODF is the smarter (.odt) ISO format for the obvious reasons that much of the world is now requiring an ISO standard. I know... The ISO was corrupted, but look into why and how and the truth of it warns of Microsoft's corruption and all to much power.
The sooner people realize and take action to gain control of the ownership of their documents the sooner the world can watch the Microsoft grip on the world settle down to were it needs to be... at the bottom of the sea.
If you *need* to spend lots of dollars to feel confident in your office productive efforts, Money spent on the Sun / Oracle version of OpenOffice is a wiser choice. Its money well spent.
As far as functionality is concerned, the Microsoft options, as polished as they are, is the sweet poison apple that lures their victims to the lock in fate.
If you have never tried the newer Open Office products... you could be in for quite an eye opener with just how functional it really is.
The help aspects of Open Office work fairly well, so clippy (poor little thing) does not have a home there either. ( didn't Albert fussy head punch clippy in the nose once, I can't remember. )
It means that, when coupled with the greatly increased worksheet sizes (over 2003), you can now create truly gargantuan, horrendous, CPU sapping models that can suck the life out of any resource you care to throw at them. It's like what the Daily Mail thought the LHC would do. I'd also guess the complexity can increase as there's more memory that can be handled.
On a slightly different note, the organisation I work for upgraded (in part only) to 2007 for the sharepoint integration but also because some departments needed more than 65536 rows on a sheet. I pointed out they might have more fundamental issues but just got strange looks.
I used to handle data-sets of ~2 million rows every few months - not worth setting-up a data base as the set was always rapidly cut down to a few thousand for further processing by applying a few limits. Of course, Excel was useless for this size, and in any case most work was done on a Linux workstation (dual Xeon). The program of choice was JMP partly due to it's ability to handle huge sets but also to rapidly isolate sub-sets for further analysis.
(The speed of the database that handled the original data was an issue as was the speed of download of the data so it was quicker to download the whole dataset and process it locally . The limits necessary to cut down the dataset had to be generated by intuition and often required a few iterations to get right so again interrogating the slow back-end database wasn't the best approach)
Having sucessfully migrated a number of small businesses away from Office I can say without question that it IS possible to do so and it DOES save a considerable sum of money.
As an example, one site I dealt with was looking at a bill of around £3000 for licensing office, a bill which was cut to £280 by taking the decsion to dump MS Office in favour of OpenOffice. I won't say the transition was completely painless but it was reasonably smooth (certainly easier than many other software migrations I've managed over the years). Management buy-in is essential, there WILL be bitching for a few weeks from some users but once this is overcome (through training or in some difficult cases by Word From Above) there is no more support overhead associated with OO than with MS Office.
A saving of over £2500 on a 10-user site is more than enough to kill any notion of upgrading for most small businesses - if the options are explained to them clearly.
I am feeling really odd, I think I need to pq, Outlook is any good?
Ok, I have used 97, 2000, 2002 and 2003 of said piece of crap, and I can tell ya, ever tried searching for a mail in outlook up to 2003? I know, it is fixed in 2007, but there you have the ribbon ... Overall, it is very bulky, you use a Word editor to compose emails? WTF! Even plug-ins can bring it to its knees, with endless restarts ... you close outlook, the plug-crashes and Outlook restarts automatically ... and you call that quality software?
I used Mail on Mac and never looked back .. on my other (non-Mac) boxes I use thunderbird, lean, mean, emailing ... Ok, our syssies (read System Admins) are cool, most of our servers are Unix flavors, only CEO wants exchange, don't ask him why, luckily he is an Apple fanboy ... so we have IMAP turned on on exchange server ... ;-)
Tbh, I have not used Office 2007 much, only a little ... so I would not know how bad it is :-p
I use OpenOffice for work, I use svg's a lot ... The only MS Windows thing I have to use is PowerPoint, because OpenOffice plays silly-billy with ppt's, as does Mac Office's powerpoint, mind you ... anyway. luckily this is very rare ... I do not have MS Office installed on my work laptop or home pc's.... But I will migrate that to OpenOffice soon ...
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