As general manager, business strategy, for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft Corporation, Alan Yates develops and guides new business initiatives for the Office products group at Redmond. While we await the release of Microsoft Office 2007, promised to hit our shelves before the end of 2006, Yates dismisses open source rival Open Office.org 2.0 as being 10 years out of date.
Allowing for a little bit of a stretch, then Office 97 was the office suite offering from Microsoft a decade ago. Quite honestly, there really hasn’t been any real innovation in office suites since the mid-1990s, so it matters not to almost all people if OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.x is functionally akin to MSO 97.
According to Yates, there are very good reasons for people to pay $500 or more for even the soon to be superseded version of Microsoft Office as opposed to paying nothing for a copy of Open Office 2.0, which the Linux crowd will tell you does the job just as well.
OOo 2.x is also available for the Windows operating system.
“It really depends upon what job you’re trying to do. Certainly, if you’re just trying to write a few notes or something, Open Office is just fine. The truth is though that Open Office.org is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focussed on 10 years ago when the model was an individual user working at their individual PC,” says Yates.
Individual user at an individual PC. How archaic…then again, isn’t that what most people still do?
“The world and Microsoft software has grown way beyond that to make it very easy to do what used to be very hard things. Most documents today are not done by one individual. They’re done by multiple people working on a project at once.
But that does not necessitate webbified applications.
Essentially, Open Office is fine if you have very limited needs because it was really designed around what Microsoft Office products were designed around 10 years ago.”
That’s about 99 percent of people.
“The Microsoft Office product line has gone way beyond that to serve multiple constituencies. We have a home and student version. We have small business versions. We have multiple enterprise versions. It has gone on to encompass working with quite a bit of server software to encompass the real challenges that businesses have today.”
The multiple versions are simply permutations of the various suite applications; logically, the more applications you want, the more you’ll pay if you want MSO. OOo is free for one or all of its suite components (though, at this time, there is no atomistic componentization; it’s either the whole suite or nothing).
Yates claims that Microsoft in reality presents a compelling pricing proposition compared to Open Office.org.
“The pricing you quoted for Office were quite on the high side compared to what customers really pay whether you’re a student or whether you’re a business,” he says.
He is right. There is a “Student and Teacher” edition that’s around $130 to $150 retail box and a little less OEM preinstalled, but its license stipulates that you have to be (obviously) a student or a teacher, and if you are one, and stop being one for any reason, you have to stop using the software or upgrade to a full version, at a cost. Granted, nobody ever reads EULAs, and rarely are they enforced, but I just thought you would like to know this for your crystal clean consciences. Also, the S-T edition of MSO has limited functionality, which I will bring up later in this post.
“The way we look at it is that the acquisition cost of the product is very rarely the end of the story. In fact, it’s usually the tip of the iceberg in terms of cost. In terms of real cost, you might find a very low number of dollars between the real cost of using Open Office when you factor in deployment costs, migration of documents, training, patching and updating, and really taking care of the software.
OOo is fully compatiable with MSO documents, and even more compatiable with older MSO version docs than the older MSO versions are themselves in some cases. So “migration of documents” isn’t an issue. The learning differential from MSO to OOo is very little, and the rest of the arguments are a wash. Compare that to the initial acquistion costs, and the cost of a perpetual licensing subscription service to Microsoft products if you’re a large institution, then the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) argument by Mr. Yates becomes comical.
“Open Office doesn’t ship with an email client.”
No, it doesn’t ship with Lookout, and is free of Lookout’s virus hole and security problems.
But, if you look at Office 2003 and use Outlook for your email, you can right click and set up a meeting.; you right click and see if someone’s on the phone or in a meeting; you can right click and see their presence information; you can right click and call a meeting of multiple people; you can take a document, immediately share it with multiple people and see if they’re available to give comments back to you or not. There is functionality that customers have asked us for and we’ve delivered well beyond just the ability to write letters and notes.”
Most large scale enterprises’ personnel don’t use this functionality, much less the average home user.
Also it should be noted that the less expensive MSO versions that Mr. Yates points at with pride do not include Lookout.
But how many people actually use that level of functionality?
“In fact we find a really interesting situation where different people use different parts of the product and we very consciously over the years created a situation where the product has some features that are very important for some users. By design not everyone is using those features. Each different type of usage tends to use different parts of the product more than other parts of the product.
According to Paul Thurrott, most people use only 10 percent of office suite functionality, but each person uses a different 10 percent. But if one office suite has 99 percent of the functionality of another, then it will satisfy most of the “10 percents” of most people.
“I think you will see with Office 2007 that we’ve looked through millions of records of data about how customers actually use the product. What we’ve tried to do with this product that we’re really excited about is to understand it in the context where someone is in a document or spreadsheet or presentation there are certain things that they tend to want to do more often than not. Previously, it’s been a little bit too hard to do that with the current menu structure. So we’ve innovated with what we call the new ribbon user interface which recognises that wherever you are in a document, say in a table, you want certain things available to you. And we’ve made the changes you can make visual so you can go down through a gallery and pick them – pick something that looks right to you.
Mr. Yates complains about the retraining costs of migrating from MSO 2003 or earlier to OOo 2.x, but the UI (user interface) changes from MSO ‘03 to MSO ‘07 are almost day-to-night compared from the differences between MSO ‘03 and OOo 2.x. From my gossip standpoint, even a level-on migration set from MSO versions 97 to 2000 to XP to 2003 was a bit of a hassle for the average user, even though the UI was almost identical across that line. Many enterprises’ IT shops are dreading MSO ‘07 and the new UI headaches it will bring.
“So, some people may not place high demands on Office but they may place unique demands on Office and we’ve tried to represent that in the product. We’ve made it easier over the years to enable people to start small and grow with the product.”
But most people will never come close to outgrowing any decent office suite.
According to Yates, criticism from some quarters that Office 2007 is going to introduce a steep learning curve for existing Office users is not going to present a major problem for Microsoft, although he admits the learning curve exists.
Hmm, that line sounds strangely familiar.
We’re working with thousands of users right now and what we see is that there is a short learning curve, a short adjustment,” he says. “Some people prefer not to have any training at all while other people do prefer to have a little bit of training to adjust to the new user interface.
“One of the things we have done, for example, is that we have really expanded the tool tips where, if you hover over something, you’ll get directions to how that feature is used. As well, if you hover over something, the entire text will change right in front of you so you’ll see what happens immediately. In fact, we have done some really smart things to mitigate the impact of transitioning to a new user interface. The result is that, yes, there is a short learning curve but, at the end of the day, you are so much more efficient compared to the old user interface that it is well worth it to undergo the switch.”
This sounds like the party line for just about every bloatware Microsoft release going back a decade and a half. All they have to do each time is cut-and-paste, and change the dates.
Hovering over things and tool tips sound nice in theory. However, some of Microsoft’s past efforts, with funny faces appearing on the screen offering advice and so on, have often served more to annoy users rather than aid them. Is there a chance that Microsoft is merely repeating its mistakes of the past, attempting to foist an over engineered product on end users, with fancy features they neither want nor asked for? Naturally, Yates does not think so.
Look out Jack, Clippy’s back.
Yates claims the backward compatibility issue of Office 2007 is another good news story because of its new Open XML file formats.
“We are changing the file format for Office. In 1997, this was a difficult event and we learned a great deal from the pain that was caused by people moving to the new file format,” he says. “This time we’ve done a number of things. There’s a wonderful reason to move to the new file formats which is that it’s open and it’s XML so that you can see everything that’s in the document if you want to. Other software products can use the XML information in the format that it was originated in.
They change the format for just about every other new MSO version in order to prod people to upgrade. And according to credible sources, the Open XML file format for MSO ‘07 isn’t open.
“The second big thing we’re doing is to provide lots of the right transition tools, which will enable an update to Office 2000, Office XP and Office 2003 so that the older products can support the newer format. Also, we have automated conversion tools so that people can take existing documents and have them converted to the new file format relatively painlessly.
“Finally, we have a planning tool so that you can go through spreadsheets and documents and determine what nuances might be there that you need to think harder about converting. Say you have a specific template or macro that your corporation uses. The tool will identify those things and help you determine how to move those forward.”
A better idea would be to adopt the Open Document Format (ODF), which Microsoft itself helped to define. Then a lot of these headaches would go away. Trouble is, so would the necessity of people having to buy a new MSO version every 2-3 years.
According to Yates, Office 2007 will not consume any additional resources than previous versions. “File sizes will be radically smaller so that when you’re sending files around they will be zipped, compressed files and they will be anywhere from 50% to 90% smaller,” he says. “In terms of overall performance, even though we’re doing a lot of new things we don’t expect the hardware requirements to be any different than Office 2003. We are developing it for the Windows XP operating system and later.”
ODF is a zipped/compressed format as well. And can one really believe that MSO ‘07 won’t have any more bloat and any bigger hardware requirements, when the trip from 95 to 97 to 2000 to XP to 2003 had a seemingly logarithmic expansion thereof?
“I don’t we foresee any problem in convincing people of the core value proposition for the product versus the competition,” he says. “We have always faced cheaper products; we’ve always faced products that were not as functional; we’ve always faced products that may not have the same level of deployment support. The arguments for our product will not just be efficiency. It will also be ease of deployment, ease of use, efficiency and productivity, connectivity with the real scenarios in government and so on.”
Actually, for the short run, their greatest competition will be themselves, or rather, older MSO versions. And I believe that, in the long run, in the absence of any Glorious Open Source Revolution, Microsoft won’t have any problem “convincing” people and firms to “upgrade.” The constant file format changes are a form of mobbish blackmail.
“I don’t view it at all as a make or break thing because there are so many customers on long term license agreements for our software. In the past, customers have told us that they don’t want much change. In this case, however, we’ve come up with a really break-through set of innovations that are going to make so clear and compelling to customers that change is worthwhile.”
But Microsoft will leverage those long term license agreements to force such customers to upgrade.
Despite the view of Yates, his final statement underlines the importance of the release of Office 2007 for Microsoft and appends an exclamation mark. The company has been told users that they are comfortable with Office and they don’t want to see too much change. However, in order to differentiate itself from its open source rival, Microsoft has decided to take the bold step – some might say gamble – of telling its customers what’s good for them. If Microsoft manages to pull it off, then its dominance of the office productivity desktop is likely to continue for another generation. If users dig in their heels, however, then Microsoft has a problem because there is a very real rival out there and it’s free.
Yes, it’s the MSO version they already have, or the OOo version they could download.
