Will we ever kill Office?
Posted by Johnnie
Microsoft Office. God, I hate it. But it’s held an overwhelming market share for many, many years. As far as I can tell, this is for three main reasons:
- Everyone else has Office, so everyone else can read the .doc that you email them
- Non-technical users feel comfortable with Office. They know how to use it, and don’t have the time or the inclination to learn a new interface.
- The management bods responsible for I.T. purchasing at big companies don’t realise that there’s an alternative. Often, Microsoft offers them a very cheap bundle deal for a bunch of Office licences. If you’ve already got ‘em, you’d be stupid not to use ‘em, right?
However, with the latest iteration of the Office behemoth (Office 2007), Microsoft have really shot themselves in the foot. They’ve discarded two of these three killer factors.
- First of all, they changed the format of all their documents, so that Word (for instance) now saves in .docx rather than .doc as it previously did. This means that you can no longer be sure that the person you email your document to can read it. If they’re running Office 2000, for instance, they won’t be able to open the file you saved from Office 2007.
- They also changed the interface. Gone are the familiar menus and buttons, to be replaced by a totally new paradigm: the Ribbon. It’s now much harder to transition from Word 2003 to Word 2007 than it is to go from Word 2003 to Open Office Writer.
Here’s the strange thing: it doesn’t seem to matter. People still use Office, doggedly persisting even though their daily routine is now nothing more than a series of increasing frustrations and blockages.
The reason for this can’t just be down to ignorance. I know there’s still a general perception that Office is the only show in town, but Open Office and the like have had a much more visible presence recently. So why? I don’t have an answer. If you still use Office, either by choice or necessity, do you fancy telling me why? I’m genuinely curious.
Update: It looks like OpenOffice.org version 3 will feature a mail app and a calendaring app, which would make it a serious threat to Microsoft Office.
Update 2: foobar has blogged a pretty in-depth dissection of the average Microsoft fan-boy, which is well worth reading.
Update 3: Red Hat Magazine has a short but excellent dissection of the shortcomings of Microsoft’s OOXML specification.
Update 4: The updates just keep coming – the imminent adoption of rejection of Microsoft’s OpenXML format as an ISO standard seems to have sparked a lot of discussion. If you can’t wait for OOo v3 for an Outlook-killer, you might want to try Spicebird, a fork of Thunderbird that adds in Calendar support (via the Sunbird codebase), RSS support, and more.
Wow. You’re dead on about why people stick with Microsoft.
Microsoft is SO STUPID.
I transitioned to OpenOffice a few years ago and haven’t looked back. It is the way of the future. I kinda reckon Universities will switch to OpenOffice first; that will drive the working world to transition too. It will take about ten years, though, which is a hella long time.
My belief is that it has always been mostly the bundling, so I’m not sure how much the format/familiarity gambles will hurt them.
More chance, I think, that they’ll lose out to the cloud – they’ve started putting more effort into Office Live, but they are a little late to this party, and they will have to move to free more cautiously than their competition in order not to kill the existing cash cow.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Excel in particular is one of those cases where at least part of the reason for a product’s success is – shock horror – that it is pretty much a best of breed solution for its (large) target market. Outlook/Exchange likewise.
First of all, we should all apologise for referring to “Open Office” rather than “OpenOffice.org”. They get very upset when you do that.
@morgue – I think you’re right about universities and the like making the switch. Government bodies and other public institutions are doing the same. The reason (at least, a large factor) is something that I didn’t even touch upon: the openness of an information storage format. The Open Document Format (which OOo implements in its entirety) is the only practical document storage format available which is genuinely open. By this I mean that the the XML specification and standards for this storage format are freely available to anyone that wants them. This greatly increases the chances of future generations being able to access and interpret the data in documents that we’re storing electronically right now. Microsoft’s answer to the ODF, called OpenXML, is a monstrous depravity of a proposition. As well as riding roughshod over pre-existing ISO standards, it’s under the complete control (including the potential for intellectual patent rights) of Microsoft. Sadly, Microsoft’s lobbying power is such that this travesty of a standard is being seriously considered for official adoption by many national bodies and specification committees.
I saw a news report only yesterday, on a major UK national news broadcaster, about the loss of service records for some WWII military personnel. The records had been stored on floppy disks, in a proprietary format designed and owned by a company long-since dissolved. As a consequence, it has now proved impossible to read these records. The data is effectively lost. The report featured lots of serious-faced people umming and ahhing and demanding a purge of all computer systems everywhere and a return to the paper-based ecosystem-killing days of yore, but not one mention of the ODF. Not a whisper. I ask you – what kind of half-assed lazy journalism is that? No wonder the modern media is in crisis. I can get a more accurate view of events from Facebook, for gawd’s sake.
@anthony – Excel is indeed a good and fairly robust piece of software. It does it’s job and it does it well, although OOo Calc could serve perfectly well for probably 95% of Excel users. The Outlook/Exchange combination is far more of a clear-cut battle. It just works, simple as that. There’s no alternative that works as well, with the same integration. Thunderbird is a great mail app – simple and powerful – but it’s just a mail app. There’s no calendar or scheduling, which is where Outlook wins for the corporate market. Even here, though, we can find signs of the Microsoft stranglehold blinding users to the alternatives. ActiveSync, which allows users to synchronise the calendars on their remote devices to their Outlook calendar, is notoriously tricky to setup for any other software. Certainly, it’s beyond the skills of a non-technical user. Nearly all smartphones and most PDAs ship with ActiveSync support only. And yet again, corporate I.T. purchasers will plump for a device running WinCE or Windows Mobile over an alternative (even a well-respected offering such as PalmOS) every time.
It’s an uphill struggle all the way, no doubt about it.
I generally use MS Word a lot, because its on the machines in uni and is stable on my MacBook (whereas there is no solid version of OpenOffice for Mac, last one I tried was unstable as a one legged table).
I still honestly prefer Word to OO writer, I find it cleaner and more pleasant to work with. In fact I’d say that the version of Word I have on my Mac is actually quite nice, though I believe its developed by a different bunch of bods at MS.