Microsoft sets date for Office revamp

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Why no numbers . . .

I notice that articles always refer to Microsoft Office as the 'industry leading productivity suite' without ever pointing out that they are referring to the entire product line going all the way back to the pre-Office '95 days. I would like to see some marketshare numbers broken down by version.

An awful lot of press is given to Microsoft's latest releases but the question is: Who is using what version of Office?

As a network technician who supplies support for numerous small businesses it is my experience that Office '97 has more 'marketshare' than the 2000, XP and 2003 versions of Office combined. As a matter of fact the only Office '03 application I've seen in use is Outlook '03 because it came bundled with their new Exchange server. I see more WordPerfect installs than I do Office XP.

Other people I've queried have similar experience. When asked "What version of Office does your company use?" Almost half the time the answer is '97. If they work for a large corporate entity the answer is likely to be '97 but we're planning an upgrade to 2000, or we've recently upgraded to 2000.

In my experience small & medium businesses who use the SP1 rule use it for operating systems only. Business that have the current version of Windows installed when they buy a new PC will consent to the installation of the 'latest & greatest' if SP1 has been released for that version, until SP1 is released a lot of businesses consider the latest version of Windows an untested beta which they want nothing to do with. However near as I can tell the rule of thumb for Office suites is "What we're using now works good enough" And few business are willing to drop several $100 per PC to upgrade a product that has meet their needs and expectations for years.

Microsoft has been struggling for years to find the silver bullet feature that will convince business to replace their old versions of Office with their latest greatest release. They've touted new intefaces, more intuitive menus, pivot tables and now XML, the fact is most businesses just want to type letters and create spreadsheets that everyone can read. Since everyone can read Office '97's file format, whether their using Office '97, Office '03, WordPerfect or OpenOffice that is the industry standard and is IMHO likely to remain so for the forseeable future.

Bjorn

Posted by: bjornafreeman@...   Posted on: 01/26/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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