Why Office 2007 won't sell

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 10 October 2006 20:47

Opinion and Analysis

Talking of learning curves, the so-called Office 2007 ribbon may well reveal its true power once you become used to it. However, to a new user the user interface is not really very intuitive. So those organizations that do decide to upgrade to Office 2007 may have to spend as much as the cost of the software again on training staff how to use the new product.

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Then of course there is the issue of backward compatibility - always an issue with new versions of Microsoft Office. Will Office 2003 be able to recognize all Office 2007 documents, complete with formatting?

Users may need to pay for a copy of Office 2007 for their home desktop and another for their laptop and perhaps others for their childrens' computers. Short of piracy, there's no getting around paying for multiple copies of Office 2007 unless users decide to put a peg in the sand and go open source.

I am now using Office 2003 but I have also installed Open Office.org installed on my machine and used it. They are very similar and virtually interchangeable. Sometimes I create a document using Google's free online wordprocessor Writely. On other occasions I have used another online wordprocessor from a crowd called Zoho, who also have a good online spreadsheet and presentation package.

The point is there are now real alternatives to paying for an expensive upgrade to Office 2007 and the open source desktop office offering Open Office.org is probably the most viable. Until now, the open source crowd have not been as vocal as they could be. The question is can they get the message out to businesses and the consumer that they no longer have to pay for office productivity software? If they can, Office 2007 is going to be a hard sell.