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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!