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Improper Marketing - UsabilityTesting

I had my first experience with Office 2007 on Monday when a Washington state worker was given the task of converting an Office 2007 Word document to Word 2003.

I was able to help because I happened to know that the agency the worker was assigned to had just purchased over one hundred licenses of Microsoft Office 2007. (I had hoped for open office or at least a review of other non Microsoft products). So it was an easy fix. Go to the IT department, have them do the conversion or load one of the Office 2007 copies and do the conversion. To be fair the agency had long planned on moving to Word and Excel from WordPerfect and QuatroPro, but lets discuss more fully.

In the old days a purchase of 100 or more copies of an office suite by a government agency would have required a bidding process and a comprehensive review of alternatives from non Microsoft Vendors coupled with an analysis of training costs.

There was no review of the current offering from WordPerfect - to my knowledge - and there was little discussion of open office outside of those I was involved with - to my knowledge. Furthermore, there are no plans to date for implementing Office 2007. I asked. In fact the first workers to move from Word Perfect are being trained in Word 2003 and there is some hope that Office 2003 will be implemented using the retrograde licensing option.

It is that last part that bothers me most. Microsoft has done a lot to come half way over on industry standards. At least Office 2007 supports open document format and XML and I look forward to finding what I am certain are other examples of Microsoft changes that are appropriate and along the lines of industry standardization. But Word 2003 is a dead end. It is so convoluted that even Microsoft will not crack the code anymore.

So let me propose that Microsoft not only stop OEMS from loading Office 2003 on new computers - as they did at the start of July 2007 - but that they also discourage retrogrades. Do away with the policy of allowing purchases of Office 2007 licenses to count as Office 2003 licenses or prohibitively charge for support of that kind of thing. It is time to move forward. Future software development will involve standards whereby any modern word processor or spread sheet can work - even the free ones from Google and Open Office.

In this manner, the office software becomes a matter of personal choice rather than business dictate.

So to wrap up this rant. The reason the whole Word 2007 conversion task came up was because a decision maker had assisted Microsoft in a Microsoft Usability Testing session. Many products were tested and as payment he got to select a Microsoft product. He selected Office 2007, did some work at home and brought that work on a memory stick back to the office where he could not read it using any of the software provided by the agency.

He of course was very pleased to learn that Office 2007 had been purchased. I can not help thinking he was part of the reason for the purchase. That is improper - especially since there are rule about taking Gifts when you are employed by the state. But lets not go there. Lets go forward.

Frank L. Mighetto CCP
Citizen State of Washington

Posted by: mighetto   Posted on: 07/11/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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