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Microsoft Office 2003 - Reviews, Overviews, Issues
securitas writes "The first users of Microsoft's Office 2003 are weighing in and the response is mixed. The new Outlook has received a favorable response, but the mantra seems to be there's little reason to upgrade unless you absolutely need the new features. Meanwhile, Bill Gates dismissed the open source competition. One of the new features - self-destructing documents - seems to have caused some confusion, because 'Microsoft says the new feature is not designed to remove all traces of a file' and MS spokesman Mike Pryke-Smith says, 'The message will still be in various places', so emails will not cleanly self-destruct. A related issue is the permissions technology called Information Rights Management, which may shut out Mac users. PC World has a detailed review of Office 2003 which sums things up well."
Software, or digital content, doesn't wear out. Even if a company could produce a perfect piece of software, office suite or otherwise, it'd be detrimental to do so under current business models. "Software as service" subscriptions could address this, but customers don't seem to go for it. To keep revenue coming in customers have to be convinced, cajoled, or forced into upgrades.
OK, none of this is news to anyone...but what are some viable commercial alternatives? The Open Source model tends to favor charging for support/service, one time charges for feature creation/customization, and donations; micropayments for content has been tried; and Macromedia and Adobe have had success with a "free-to-view pay-to-create" model.
The current "artificial upgrade" seems unethical and possibly doomed. Are traditional business obsolete in the digital arena? What's next?
I can appreciate the value of the concept of self-destructing documents. We all know that once information becomes digital, the potential of controlling its integrity is questionable at best, but that notwithstanding, it could be a useful feature.
However, my concern over the abuse of this feature overshadows any benefit it may offer. If documents, or even worse, all files, now have flags associated with them that could trigger not easily interruptable deletion, you can imagine the total havoc an il-behaved program could wreak on a user's system.
Can you imagine worms and viruses that mass flag files for automatic destruction at random dates? Receive a nasty e-mail or visit the wrong web site and have it cause files to dissapear months later with virtually no evidence or detectable agent? That's scary.
Of course, I'm sure Microsoft has carefully considered these circumstances so we have nothing to worry about.
I know this much: this will be disabled to send or recieve at every lawfirm in the world. You are simply not going to read something that you can't print out, copy, etc and will expire in four hours.
What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies. Its a shame really.
Not to mention they can't plug the "analog hole" namely the fact that your monitor is a passive listening device and as such screenshots cannot be blocked. Even if they block it on the OS level a cheap digital camera will do in a pinch.
I had a lecturer at uni whose entire course was in powerpoint.
not coincidentally, it was the worse course I've ever had.
since taking decent notes was impossible, the only thing to do was download the presentations (43MB for a bit of text and pictures!) and print them off, 2 slides per page.
worst... technology... ever!
Having been a consultant for over 8 years, most business users I know still haven't grasped the feature set from Office 95, little alone '97, 2000, XP and now 2003. The reason they upgrade has largley been due to compatibility issues (users unable to open documents sent to them buy users with newer versions).
The "need for features" is not because most users need them, but rather Microsoft needs them to make the case for upgrading.
Open Office, Star Office and other suites will eventually win over Microsoft Office. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon.
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I predicted this the first time I heard about Microsoft's content "protection" feature. People complain that Palladium-style DRM will prevent people from booting Linux, but that would be far too blatent. Instead, "protections" like these are going to turn Microsoft file formats, which are hard enough to reverse engineer already, into proprietory files protected from reverse-engineering by the DMCA. How long will it be before some sort of content-protection functionality is needed to open *all* Office documents, not just ones that specify certain protections? After all, Windows users would never know --- Office will dutifully open encrypted letters from grandma, but a Linux user will be shut out, even if he should be able to read the document.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Hope you're right. More likely, whatever Office 2003 uses to authenticate that you're the intended recipient of a DRM word doc isn't going to work with OO. Once the doc is locked, OO isn't going to have the key to open it.
And, since it's DRM, it's going to harder to reverse-engineer that key, than, say, the document format. And, even if it is reversed, I wonder if it'll be a DMCA violation.
Not a big issue; you, of course, don't have to lock your documents. This time. Next version of Office, watch for the DRM feature to be 'on' by default; you have to turn it off, but it'll just take a preference selection. Version after that, two versions from now, DRM "feature" is on all the time, and takes arcane hacks to turn it off.
Bet on it.
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