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Information Technology News Office 2007 may be Microsoft's Titanic: former Government IT boss
Information Technology News Office 2007 may be Microsoft's Titanic: former Government IT boss | Office 2007 may be Microsoft's Titanic: former Government IT boss |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Saturday, 18 November 2006 | |
  
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According to Dr Hodgkinson, the new version Microsoft Office, the software giant's second biggest money earner after Windows, is headed for a giant obstacle with major sites in both the public and private sector. Cost of product upgrade aside, Dr Hodgkinson believes the migration will be a hard sell. "The migration effort, including training, has created an obstacle for them," says Dr Hodgkinson. "Microsoft will have to work really hard to make the migration path as trouble free as possible." Perhaps an even bigger problem, according to Dr Hodgkinson, will be for Microsoft to convince enterprise users that they need to upgrade. "The problem is that so few users will benefit from the new functionality because so few users use even all of the existing functionality. Therefore it's questionable how many people will use the new features of Office 2007," says Dr Hodgkinson. Meanwhile, Dr Hodgkinson is fairly positive about the prospects in large enterprises of open source office productivity alternatives to Microsoft Office, such as Open Office.org 2.0. "Sites like Singapore Defence have gone with Open Office. The big issue was thought to be training costs. However, it has proven not to be a big deal in the case of the Singapore site," Dr Hodgkinson says. With freely available open source alternatives to Microsoft Office proving to be viable implementations on large sites, Dr Hodgkinson believes the signs are ominous for the fate of Office 2007. "I wouldn't want to be a first mover on any of this," he says. "I don't see a whole lot of demand in user bases to migrate to Office 2007. This may well be the biggest disaster Microsoft has ever created for itself."{moscomment} |
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