Another list just completed a survey on what office products are in use and why people are not upgrading to MSOffice 2003
Here are the results. Thought you all might find it funny. I personally found it hilarious. >>>COST AND FEATURES No surprise that the most common reasons for not upgrading are either the cost or the lack of new features to justify the cost. Many people quoted prices of over US$300 (Holy **** batman!) to upgrade to Office 2003 as being too much for features they don't need. And there's the extra costs; re-training, changing add-ins, buying new books and perhaps hardware upgrades to accommodate the new Office. >>>TOO MANY FEATURES A lot of people said that Office is 'bloated' with too many features that they don't need or make the program slower. We don't fully agree with this opinion. Office is a broad based product that includes a wide range of features to cover the needs of many people. A product with less features might not necessarily be faster and runs the risk of not having what you need. Microsoft's problem is that everyone's needs are different and it would be more expensive to produce software that had narrowly defined sets of features. A partial analogy would be an encyclopedia - you might not want all the parts of the volume but your interests are different from other people. It would be too expensive to produce an encyclopedia that didn't have much history coverage and other with less science and so on. The publishers produce a single work with broad coverage for you to read the parts you like. Newspapers are the same, we all buy the one edition even if we ignore some parts (I ignore sports, but my neighbor goes to it first). "Extra features" - seem to me this is a Microsoft's euphemism for "we fixed the bugs from the previous version(s) for which you paid a fortune." - Jackie. Jackie is probably right to some extent, paid upgrades too often include fixes for earlier bugs (some of which were never publicly disclosed). " When I look at these 'new' features they are often changes that make an earlier innovation useful in the real world. Microsoft must have known the original feature wasn't truly useful and expect us to pay for obvious improvements that should have been there in the first place. I remember the 'improvements' to the grammar checking - the original version was useless but included for marketing reasons, not the daily use of customers." - Richard L. We absolutely agree with Richard. Too often new features are over-hyped and under developed - it takes Microsoft a paid version or two to get a feature to a point where it is useful. I'm sure we've all bought Office on the basis of a promise about some new feature only to find it lacking essentials that would make it truly useful. Mail merge is a good example from the past. Early Word for Windows had powerful mail merge functions but lacked essential and easy access to things like suppressing blank lines in addresses. Anyone who produced a letter or label knows that feature is essential but it was missing from several versions of Word. You could do it with some messy coding but not in any obvious way. Microsoft is paying a price for not giving the customers what they truly need in the first place. People feel cheated out of their money and are resistant to paying more money to get what they were promised in the past. >>>RELIABILITY Put bluntly, people don't trust Microsoft to release a stable product. They don't see why they should pay for a new set of bugs. " I'll buy a new Office when they produce a bug free version." - Sue M Sadly it'll never be possible to release a truly 'bug free' piece of software - or at least not in the foreseeable future. Modern software is so complex and runs on such a variety of hardware configurations that it's not possible to handle all the situations that might arise. It is true that Microsoft could do a much better job about communicating possible problems to their customers. Customers would not be so afraid of bugs if they knew the makers were more forthcoming about them. Bugs are an aggravation that is compounded by a lack of communication from Microsoft. >>>TOO MUCH COLLABORATION Top of the list of feature complaints was the focus on collaborative features that are of no use to people at home or in small businesses. While the focus on collaboration is good for Microsoft's attempt to sell Office with its server based products (like Exchange Server) there's a perception that they have ignored the solo or small team users that cannot justify that infrastructure. Net Folders are greatly missed. This was a feature in Outlook that allowed you to share a folder among many users - updates were sent via emails between the clients. Microsoft dropped Net Folders in part because they wanted people to buy Exchange Server or Sharepoint instead. Another reason was that Net Folders were so buggy and unreliable as to be almost useless. In our view it was a case of 'good riddance to bad rubbish' but clearly there is a need for some type of small scale sharing among friends, family or small businesses. >>>PREFER THE 'OLD' TOOLBAR Many people expressed a preference for the 'old style' toolbars which surprised us a bit. While Microsoft has changed the look of the toolbars a bit over the years, it has mostly been decorative rather than functional in our view. Microsoft has always loved touting such 'advances' as 3D toolbar buttons but really it's a stylistic change that makes no real difference to the way you use Office. "I HATE looking at and using the fuzzy, rounded toolbars that are made for pre-schoolers, and that I cannot change back to the flat, efficient, and less real-estate intensive toolbars of Office XP. " - Dave H This resistance to superficial changes is interesting because it makes us wonder, even more, how much trouble Microsoft will have if it persists in implementing the new user interface in Office 12 with no ability to switch to a 'classic' mode. >>>DUMBING DOWN " Microsoft has dumbed it down, making it harder to find things or accomplish tasks. I want to be able to do my work without the 'help'. " - Jonathon. People who have used Office for years are increasingly resentful of the extra 'help' and wizards that, while good for beginners, ignore the needs of people who have used Office for years and devoted a lot of time to becoming familiar with it. Personally I like 'wizards' when I'm first using a feature, but after a while they become annoying. It would be much better if wizards ended with a single dialog that displayed all the options and let you change them on the one screen. More experienced users could then skip the 'Spanish inquisition' of a wizard and jump straight to a single configuration screen. Imagine a bicycle company. They do research that shows most kids need training wheels on their bikes - so the company decides to put training wheels on their products. For cost saving and 'ease of use' they weld the training wheels onto the frame so it's difficult or impossible to remove them. The corporate logic is that buyers need help so they provide it - but ignore the needs of even mildly experienced riders. That sounds silly I know, but more and more Microsoft is focusing on the 'lowest common denominator' of user and ignoring the needs of their longer term customers. Nowhere is that more clearly demonstrated than in the radically new Office 12 user interface. Having used it for a few months now it feels more and more like a set of 'training wheels' you can't remove or even change. Unlike bike training wheels, the new UI has some good features, but the lack of configurability is a major pest as time goes by. >>>HASSLE Time is a valuable commodity for most of us and we all know from bitter experience that upgrading Office isn't a simple process. While Microsoft has made the setup/upgrade itself easier we all know that the work has just begun when the setup has completed. It takes time to work your way through the changes. If you have add-ins, customizations or macros you have to change them to suit the new Office. All this takes away from the perceived value of upgrading. Changes in the document format is a big concern - people remember the pain Microsoft has put us through in years gone by and the company has not done enough to reassure people that they won't make that mistake again. There's considerable fear and apprehension about the document formats in Office 12 - concerns that we don't think will be justified (touchwood). >>>I HAVE A LIFE A few people simply said they could not be bothered - and that's fair enough. With Office being such a full featured set of programs already, it's hard for many people to get excited about more new things. They are understandably comfortable with what they have and prefer to keep things the way they are. The same thing has happened with other products, though usually the timeline isn't as fast as it is with software. When I was young (the 60's) many people bought a new car every year or two. There were new and compelling features being introduced that made the switch justified - improved safety, comfort and handling were making leaps of development in a short time. These days people hold onto their cars for a lot longer because there's not that much difference between one year's models and the next (despite all the hype otherwise). All cars are sufficiently comfortable, have decent entertainment options, good handling and safety to keep most people happy for years. It's not always a question of the cost of buying a new car, rather that there's little real reason to upgrade. Microsoft Office has reached that plateau in a much shorter timeframe. Like the car industry, their earlier corporate practices have cost them dearly in the long term. After Ralph Nader and his successors, how many people trust the car industry even to this day? Microsoft's aggressive practices let them grow very quickly but will make it harder to continue that growth as consumers become wary of the company and refuse to accept their promises at face value. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
