Text 5806, 70 rader
Skriven 2005-07-09 13:48:10 av Mike '/m' (1:379/45)
Ärende: Microsoft looks to partners to force Office upgrades
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From: Mike '/m' <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/07/08/_office_partners/

===
Microsoft is calling on its partners to overcome customer inertia in the Office
franchise, and help drive sales of its desktop and server productivity system.

Microsoft opened its Worldwide partner conference with tantalizing tales of
$140bn in unrealized market opportunities for companies building applications
and services using Office 2003 in messaging and collaboration, portal and
enterprise content management, enterprise project management and smart client.

Highlighting portal and smart client, Microsoft claimed companies can realize
profit margins of between 20 per cent and 40 per cent building plug-ins and
services for Office 2003, with start-ups breaking even in their first nine
months.

Large-scale opportunities are available primarily as a result of the fact large
numbers of customers are not upgrading to later editions of Office, like Office
2003. While Microsoft claims 600 million Office users analysts estimate 30% are
still running Office 1997, having skipped Office 2000 and Office XP.

The prime reason is Office 97 is "good enough" for these users' needs....
===


Speaking from my own experience, I was upgraded at work from MS Office
'97 to MS Office XP 2002.  My version of MS Office has to remain at the
tail end of the upgrades because I create spreadsheets, reports, and macros for
others in the company, and I have to be compatible with the oldest versions in
use.

One of the MS Access reports that I publish uses a cross-tab query.  In MS
Access the query took less than 5 seconds to run.  In MS Access XP 2002, the
query takes between 20 and 30 seconds to run.  This is going against a local
Access database.


One of the MS Excel spreadsheets that I publish requires the sorting of a lot
of data (the disk file for the spreadsheet is over 4MB in size). MS Excel '97
used to sort the data in about 10 seconds, without any problems.   MS Excel XP
2002 takes close to 25 sconds to sort the data,
and the spreadsheet will usually hang on a subsequent operation (such as insert
row) that I do in the spreadsheet.


So in the two instances above, Office '97 wasn't just "good enough" it was far
better, faster and more reliable than MS Office XP 2002.  Based upon what I
have experienced in the first two weeks of using MS Office XP 2002, I'd never
recommend to anyone that they upgrade from MS Office
'97.

And then there is the cursor clutter that I see in MS Excel.  Funny little
icons are constantly appearing next to the cursor as I move around the
spreadsheet, distracting my attention from what I am trying to accomplish with
the spreadsheet.   To me it looks like Microsoft
could not think of any good features to add to MS Excel, so they decided to add
eye-candy clutter.  That stupid paper clip has been reincarnated.

This saddens me because MS Excel is one of my all-time favorite applications,
and now I see it being brought down under the weight of instability, slowness
and eye-candy.  I may have to revise my comment to say that MS Excel '97 is one
of my all-time favoritte applications....

 /m

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