Office 2007 may be Microsoft's Titanic: former Government IT boss

Stan Beer
Friday, 17 November 2006 19:15

IT Industry - Market

Bill Gates has been talking up Office 2007 ahead of its business launch on November 30. However, the recently departed deputy CIO of one of Australia's biggest government Microsoft sites believes introducing the new version of Microsoft Office may be the company's biggest ever disaster.

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, the recently departed Deputy CIO for the Victorian State Government, a 40,000 desktop Windows and Office site, says Office 2007 could well be a disaster that Microsoft has created for itself. Dr Hodgkinson, now research director, public sector IT at global analyst group Ovum, was responsible for e-government and IT strategy across the Victorian Government’s agencies and led the program to establish the Office of the CIO.

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."