Tell me why I need to upgrade to Office 2007 again?

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 28 November 2006 07:34

Opinion and Analysis

I have had a play with it, tried writing a small article in a beta version of Word 2007, and looked at Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. However, I still can’t for the life of me figure out why I would want to upgrade to Outlook 2007. Then again, I’m not a corporate user.

Dealing with the corporate side of things first, Microsoft has obviously made a big effort in this area because it is the key to the success of the product. Thus, there is a big focus on improved workgroup capabilities, Outlook is now optimized to handle group scheduling, Excel has improved charting capabilities, Powerpoint is supposed to be easier to use (I never found it particularly difficult).

All of the above and other functionality improvements are supposed to add up to improved productivity for corporate workers. However, the big kicker in the Office 2007 kitbag is the new user interface. The so-called “Ribbon” is supposed to do away with the familiar but now (according to Microsoft) obsolete menu system.

The new Office 2007 GUI is supposed to be so damned intuitive that we will all wonder how we ever got along without it. If it’s so intuitive how come even Microsoft says we’ll all need to be retrained to learn how to use it properly. I played around with it for a while and eventually got the hang of it but it didn’t seem that intuitive to me.

In fact, after mucking around with my trial version of Office 2007, I was glad to get back to my clunky old Word menu system, which I have been using in one form or another on PCs and Macs for not too far short of two decades.

For small business and home users, there is absolutely no reason at all to upgrade to Office 2007. In fact, about 95% of all office productivity software users, whether at home or in the corporate office, will not be one iota more productive with Office 2007 and the cost of changing will be significant, both in terms of the software and the training.

Unfortunately for the 95% of us, however, our collective fate may well lay in the hands of a few corporate CIOs who will convince their CEOs that upgrading to Office 2007 will improve the productivity of their workers. So what? So everything. In Microsoft’s case, that’s the ball game.

The workers who have had Office 2007 foisted upon them will save files in Office 2007. In order to read Office 2007 files properly, others will also need to upgrade to Office 2007. To take work home, office workers will need to have Office 2007 at home. To get a job at a corporation that uses Office 2007, an office worker will need to train in Office 2007. Schools will need to get Office 2007 so that their students are properly prepared for the corporate workplace.

That’s how Microsoft has always worked in the past, so there’s no reason to suggest that the largest software company in the world will not continue with the tried and tested formula.

There is a faint hope that a few enterprising corporations will dig in their heels and say no to what will really be a totally unnecessary and costly upgrade. They may even consider doing what a small but growing number of cost conscious sites have done, such as the Singapore Ministry of Defence, and move across to an Open Office solution.  However, don’t bet the house on it.