On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski
<swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> [WS:] I agree that Excel is a pretty good product, but my issue with it is of a "moral" or rather "political" nature i.e. that of the control over the tools of trade (which has been a centerpiece of the 20th century labor-management struggle.) Microsoft uses planned obsolescence in their products, and depends on its monopolistic market dominance to force that obsolescence down the throats of everyone, whether one likes it or not. That creates problems for people like me, who use their products for a living. The only way to fight back is to use alternatives, but that becomes problematic when such alternatives are of inferior quality.
Microsoft releases new software and eventually stops supporting old software. Arguably this is a planned obsolescence cycle. On the other hand, for Office, support for a released version of Office (including security updates) doesn't stop until 10 years after the original release date, which means that you can still get security updates and (paid) support for Office 2000.
This is not any different from Open Source. Debian GNU/Linux does security fixes only for their "stable" distribution, and offers no support for earlier versions -- which means that as of today, all versions of Debian earlier than April 2007 are unsupported. And could you get anything but laughter if you asked for support for OpenOffice 1.0 on a newsgroup?
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> Case in point. My employer, a solidly Microsoft shop, recently forced an "upgrade" to Office 2007 on their systems. That created multiple problems for me to the point that I refused to use their machines and I bring my own laptop to work. Of course, I can invest my time in learning how to use Office 2007, which has been totally changed from the previous version. However, I do not think it is the best use of my time, since in all likelihood, Microsoft will use planned obsolescence in two or so years, and will rearrange Office 2007 to something new. A better use of my time is to find an alternative that is not likely to be subject to planned obsolescence to the degree that MS products are. Hence my interest in open source software.
Speaking about the changes to the GUI (and they were radical, yes, in Office 2007), you don't have a lot of evidence in your favor here. The basic toolbars/menus/document-window GUI of Office 2003 was introduced in 1993 with Word 6.0 and remained unchanged until 2007. For a cash cow like Office, Microsoft tends to be very conservative about backwards compatibility. But when the product group asked customers what features they wanted to see added to the successor to Office 2003, they found that 8 of the top 10 requests were *already* in the product -- just buried deep in the menu structure, difficult to discover, or difficult to use.
To some extent *The Feature* of Office 2007 is the new interface. The idea was not to add a couple of features and then change the interface around so everyone would have to learn to use the product again. The idea was to make it possible for users to figure out how to use the features already in the product. To completely rearrange the UI again for Office 14 would defeat all that product work. What you will see in Office 14 is all the "outlier" programs like Visio, Outlook, and OneNote get brought up-to-date with the new UI paradigm. Frankly, I can't wait. I like Visio and OneNote a *lot* (OneNote especially), but they have so many features that toolbar-and-menu UI makes them particularly hard to use.
(That said -- if you navigate Office using the keyboard, Office 2007 is 100% keystroke backward-compatible with 2003. Microsoft is nothing if not back-compat obsessed.)
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> PS. I wonder why the business community acquiesces to Microsoft planned obsolescence scam. It must cost them a bundle in lost productivity and extra training, not to mention the cost of the software itself that offers pretty pictures but not necessarily greater functionality.
Well, for one, Microsoft's biggest customers have enterprise site licenses and support agreements for all their software, which they pay for per year. So if there's an advantage to upgrading to a newer version, they will; and if there's no advantage, they won't (until the 10-year support window expires, I guess). That's one reason Vista has been such a flop -- businesses don't have to upgrade; so even though Vista is "free" for them, they don't see any advantage (in terms of productivity gains, etc) so they have stuck with XP. Server 2008, on the other hand, has been a huge success.
And, because the Office 2007 UI changes were made in consultation with a wide variety of customers, businesses are upgrading because even though they'll take a hit bringing everyone up to speed on the new UI, it will mean that people will finally be able to figure out how to effectively use style sheets and mail merge in Word and data bindings and the more sophisticated charting in Excel, and so forth down the line.
And (if I may plug my own product briefly) they'll upgrade to Office 14 because they want to run their Excel actuarial models on a cluster, which is one of the new features coming in the new release.
-- John
-- "The more I practice, the luckier I get." -- Ben Hogan