Will
Microsoft Define Office Work One More Time
Microsoft first showed me Office 12 (now
renamed Office 2007), under NDA in June, 2006. My reaction
was completely divided. On the one hand, I was impressed
by the new and quite engaging interface Microsoft’s UI
designers proposed. On the other hand, I couldn’t
imagine that a company with 300 million (!)users was embarking
on a plan to launch an upgrade product with an entirely new
interface.
Over the summer I spent a lot of time
thinking about it. Obviously, professionals who spent a
lot of time with Word (or any of the other Office applications)
could learn most of the basics of the new interface in a few
hours. But (enormous but) someone would have to tell them
or Microsoft and its customers would have enormous help desk
costs getting users moved from their prior Office product
to Office 2007.
The
Question Is: Is This An Upgrade Or A New Decision?
Some users were going to need training and
that was going to open Pandora’s box, I thought.
When a company is firmly in place as the
market owner (as Microsoft is with its Office Suite, with 93% of
the business market in the U.S. and significant shares
elsewhere, it’s really important for customers to think of
advances in the product to look like upgrades to something
customers are already committed to. That makes it easy to
decide to keep using the same product.
If a vendor replaces a favorite existing
product with something noticeably “new,” the user may view
this as a new decision. New decisions frequently signal
the user to look around and see what other choices might be
available. Microsoft might think that there aren’t any
other choices so it doesn’t matter.
What
Are The Alternatives?
I was thinking that there were really two
very different issues here:
-
There are other Office Suites.
Corel keeps enhancing the WordPerfect Office Suite and
it’s actually gaining small bits of market share.
It’s less expensive and if customers, especially in the
SMB, education, and government market decided to look around
before deciding to re-up with Microsoft they might nice
WordPerfect. There are two other kinds of choices.
One is to choose an Open Source solution like Open Office;
it’s been improved nicely over time (and remember this
doesn’t necessarily mean using Linux – OpenOffice
comes in the Windows flavor, too). Or users could
explore an on-line SaaS version of office function like
HyperOffice. (www.HyperOffice.com).
This would be particularly appealing to small businesses
(low cash outlay, pay as your go, as well as to companies
that have users on the road since everything is available
from a browser anywhere.
-
Philosophically, however, there’s a
much bigger question. Companies might choose to see
what their users actually do. One consulting firm in
Europe does desktop studies and reliably finds that most
users spend most of their time in the browser doing email,
browsing the web for information, and interacting with a
line of business (LOB) application. That doesn’t
leave them much time to actually use the features in an
Office suite. We suspect some companies may figure
this out and start giving many users a simpler environment,
based on a portal interface, and provide office suite
function on an as needed basis. That will probably
mean continuing to buy office suites for some users and
using on demand office software for the occasional needs of
the rest. Another SaaS application, of course.
Microsoft has tried to make Office 2007 too
attractive to pass up. In addition to new features in the
suite itself and the new interface, it also acts as the
foundation for collaboration and other higher function
applications that involve Microsoft servers and services.
The new interface includes hundreds of built-in templates,
allowing users to achieve professional graphic looks for their
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without investing the
time to learn how to do it – or just the time to make it
happen.
Microsoft
also makes it really easy for customers on subscription with
Microsoft to get the software.
It simply becomes available at no additional charge to
the subscribing organization. It remains to be seen
whether these organizations will vote for the new features or
feel that the cost of managing a migration, especially one which
requires additional training and support, is worth the
expenditure of organizational resources. We’ll be
sending you a survey shortly about this, looking for some
insights.
