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.