You notice the resounding theme that all of this stuff was released in a period where MS was just pumping out half baked crap. Vista Office 2007 Some server products that will go unnamed.
Most of it has been taken care of in subsequent service packs and for the most part are solid now. But something was going on in that period where MS lost focus on the products and was all about shoving stuff out the door as fast as possible. I think half baked is a good term. I do however think that MS has learned a serious lesson here and I suspect we will see the next versions of these products substantially improved upon even if the reality (IMO) is they will all be .5 releases regardless of what you call them. I'm looking forward to the next versions. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 10:34 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Gone way OT: Windows 7 On TechNet Now On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Steven Peck <[email protected]> wrote: > On a podcast I heard a challenge for people complaining about the > changes, have a regular user use Office 2007 for 4-6 weeks. The thing I hate most about the Office 2007 discussion is some people inevitable come back with "you'll get used to it in a few weeks". I know that. People can learn and/or get used to darn near anything. You can get used to daily beatings. Doesn't mean it's worth the pain. It's not just the retraining for users. We've got Office 2000, 2002, and 2003 deployed here. We can use the same documentation, training, procedures, simulations, and support questions for all of them. Likewise with XP and 2000 when we had both, because XP could be told to look just like Windows 2000 during the transition. Not so for Office 2007. So it's either any all-at-once-and-nothing-first migration, or dealing with the hassles of two concurrent UIs. I'm aware there is a third-party product that will add the old-style menus back into Office 2007. So, not only am I supposed to spend $400/seat upgrading an *office suite*, I'm now supposed to spend *extra money* just go get it to *look the way it does now*. Where exactly is the ROI on this? > It's not 'throwing out 25 years of working UI conventions' .... Yes, it is. If it was just "applying the knowledge learned" they could have kept the pull-down menu system that *literally practically every other program on Earth uses*, but simply reorganized them into a more useful layout. I've long maintained that MS Office's pull-down menu layout is poor. One of my favorite word processors of old, GeoWrite, had a much better UI layout, but used the same pull-down menus everything else does. And to really add insult to injury, once you click the appropriate icon in the ribbon, the dialog box you get as a result is not uncommonly the same damn poorly-laid-out, poorly-documented, confusing dialog box you had in Office 2003. I'm not impressed. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
