Posted by Johnnie
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:12:00 GMT
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.
Posted in Geek, People I Hate | Tags docx, microsoft, office, open, ribbon, software, source | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:05:00 GMT
Honestly. I ask you.
Posted in Geek, People I Hate, Rants | Tags error, idiocy, microsoft, vista, windows | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:38:00 GMT
It was very satisfying, in a twisted way, to be ranting about Microsoft again the other day. It’s been too long. It was even more satisfying, though, to discover that we won. Stick that in your proprietary codec and smoke it.
The title of the post, by the way, comes from the Q&A session with Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith.
Posted in Geek, People I Hate, Rants | Tags brad smith, court case, drm, fine, microsoft, open rights group, people i hate, proprietary codec, rants, windows media player | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Johnnie
Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:29:00 GMT
I’m writing this from one of the public-access terminals at my local library. It’s a thin client system, which needless-to-say runs Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. Gah!
Every two minutes, the system tray pops up a balloon to helpfully tell me that A Java update is available. Apparently I also have unused icons on my desktop – click here to clean them up. Every three minutes, that one.
Finally, the most annoying Helpful Windows Prompt™ of all time, Your computer needs to be restarted in order for the new updates to take effect. Restart now? No, Windows! Don’t restart now, thank you very much! In fact, don’t restart at all. As I’m not logged on as an administrator, I don’t have the privileges to restart anyway, so if I clicked the restart button, you’d just tell me I couldn’t. You know it, and I know it, so stop bugging me! Goddam it! Every five accursed minutes!
God, this site looks fugly on IE, doesn’t it? Sorry about that, those who are forced by circumstance to use The Cancer Of The Internet. Those who do so by choice have earned my eternal hatred. I’m not going to fix it – I spend far too much of my life making websites work under IE.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. The restrictions on this computer are crazy. I just tried to open up a second IE window to grab some urls for this post. Apparantly This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Are you kidding me? Two browser windows is too much anarchy for you? Give me a break.
Ah-ha! I’ve just remembered – I’ve got Portable Firefox on a USB stick in my bag. Happy browsing here we come … nope. Can’t use external storage either.
Bollocks to it. I’m going home. There’s a *nix box with my name on it.
Posted in Annecdotes, Geek, Meta, People I Hate, Rants | Tags annecdotes, frustration, geek, internet explorer and why it must die, linux, meta, microsoft, rants, restrictions, thin clients, windows | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by johnnie
Wed, 23 Aug 2006 18:18:00 GMT
I’ve been complaining for a long time about Internet Explorer. Version 6 currently makes my life a living hell, and version 7 isn’t set to do much about that. Paul Thurrott agrees with me. In fact, he goes further, describing IE as a cancer on the Web that must be stopped, and claiming that the amount of time it’s taken Microsoft to finally start work on IE7 has set back Web development by an immeasurable amount of time.
(Mind you, version 6 has it’s own problems)
Thurrott recommends a complete boycott of Internet Explorer. So do I. Please, please, please … get a better browser.
Posted in Geek, Rants | Tags css, design, microsoft, web | 2 comments | no trackbacks
