Slashdot Mirror
Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester
An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."
Google took a page right out of Microsoft's playbook by buying a company who was already working on web based doc writers, effectively beating Microsoft to the game.
Personally I wouldn't trust important documents to stay on the web server. What happens when google goes belly up and starts shutting down their web servers? The bigger a company gets, the bigger they fall.
There are collaborative real-time editors such as Gobby. Together with an audio-chat this is a great tool for collaboration.
I am against huge monopolies controlling everything we do on our computers with their close sourced spy crapware. Down with the G$$G-borg! Fight for Microsoft! Up with freedom!
Microsoft Word is an amazingly innovative and capable program. It does everything I need with an intuitive interface that even your grandmother could use, but is l33t enough for the geekiest power user. Plus, it's free! All power to Microsoft, fight the evil corporate empires!!!!
Companies are using Windows "Out of habit". Hopefully, the Obama stimulus will involve converting all government computers to use Ubuntu and hiring thousands of college students and underemployed programmers to work on FREE Open Source Software.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
MS has had online capability for years now where multiple people can open and edit documents at the same time. It was just over the corporate network.
I'd like to confirm that the internet has not changed the way I write word documents. It's still a mouse and keyboard for me. I don't tend to share documents that much - I email them and that's that. I'd imagine this is true of most Word users, or at least, most Word documents.
analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using [insert-any-application-here] because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option
What an amazing insight! Who would have suspected such a thing?
which is totally what she said
I always feel I am fighting it to get it to do what I want. If I wanted to fight computers, I would buy computer games.
What's the point of this post? I'm simply saying the article speaks the truth.
Any company has a large number of existing documents. To switch to a different file-incompatible program would be silly; the cost of converting would far exceed any possible savings, not to mention the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously.
If OpenOffice/etc. are guaranteed 100% compatible with Word documents, they aren't promoting that fact very well. If they aren't compatible, they're not serious competition.
The latest and greatest version of Ninnle Office has been released, and quite a few businesses have been opting for this, running under Ninnle of course, as an alternative to Word. The transition to Ninnle Office is seamless, because it looks, feels and works just about the same, but is much more stable and reliable than the MS software. Since it runs under Ninnle Linux, it's just about bulletproof in terms of security as well. So how can you lose? Join the Ninnle revolution!
The first time the file serving cloud takes a nosedive, everyone will scream and run away.
Sure, Microsoft already eats files on a regular basis, but not in a coordinated mini-apocalypse.
And yes, Google Docs could do(has done) that too, but people aren't yet using it on the same scale. (Plus it is in beta, ha-ha, not their fault)
Same thing in education too. I tried SO hard to move people from Microsoft Office to Open Office, but even though it worked fine with office docs, in the end people felt comfortable with MS Office. The only way that would change is through a policy change and when your administration doesnt care about what they spend money on and whats better, why the hell would they sign off on such a change.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
"The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option.""
There's two other things as well. How well MS products integrate with each other and all the third-party software written for MS software.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
On the whole subject of collaborative document editing, I think this is the real kicker. Many companies block Google's tools since that would mean storing company info outside of the company. Add to this the "beta" caveat that Google carries, and Google no longer considers itself liable if competitors get access to the info. After all, they did tell you it was buggy and all...
Are we really moving back to a server/terminal mentality? More importantly, is it a good thing that we are adding traffic to do tasks that were done with local media? I think corporations like the idea of collaborative editing, but they would prefer it of everything stayed behind their firewalls and on their own server's drives.
Any company has a large number of existing documents. To switch to a different file-incompatible program would be silly; the cost of converting would far exceed any possible savings, not to mention the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously.
Your existing office suite isn't going to magically stop working.
And the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously is one you pay every few years with Office *anyway*.
Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Well yeah...
How much do these people charge to provide such pearls of wisdom? And who'se paying?
Pete Boyd
Go ahead, mod me offtopic, but somebody has to do it. http://begthequestion.info/
My company (large IT firm) blocks the use of google docs from anywhere within the corporate network. Just attempting to navigate to google docs generates a warning page about accessing a site that contravenes corporate policy, and that repeated "violations" will be logged and reported to management. Many's the time it would have been much more convenient to perform some collaborative task in google docs rather than routing a DOC all over the goddamned place via email attachment ... but it is not to be.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Should have been:
"From the no shit! dept."
--from the Grow A Pair dept.
How hard can it be to switch? This post will neither debate the advantages or disadvantages of word or wordprocessors. Just the latter... of users.
Having recently had to interact with the "real world" and wordprocessor documents, I must say that I was astounded at the quality of output of wordprocessors. The main problem is that even technically capable people seem to refuse outright to make any effort to actually learn how to use a tool that they spend hours per day sitting in front of. They treat a wordprocessor as a typewriter with font effects and images.
People still can't embed images properly. Either they're linked to some program which noone else has or a bitmap of a vector drawing so noone else can edit them. People still refuse to make even the most basic use of styles or cross referencing. It is absolutely astounding.
People will happily put in HOURS per document on a daily basis, fiddlind around with font dialogs, instead of spending 1 our learning how to use styles, for instance.
How hard can it be to switch? Users would go from not knowing how to use word to not knowing how to use openoffice.
But it really does amaze me how people can use the same tool all day, every day for weeks at a time, or even more and still not know many of the most basic features. Sure people want to "get work done", but that is best achieved by becoming an expert in the tools of the trade. When was the last time you heard a carpenter refusing to learn how to use a power saw because he "needed to get work done"?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We will not be going on net for document creation... Get your heads out of the clouds and back to ground. The mere thought of being reliant on resources out of our control is insanity. The Bandwidth issue not withstanding, security and infrastructure concerns aside, this is folly and is meant to drive another INTERNET bubble of fools looking for the next big tech movement. Let's start talking about how better to organize what we have instead of watching repeats of William Shatner's Techwar ok ? Cripes.
End of Line.
Why do you dream about smoking a user? Not user friendly.
In Canada there was concern about banks storing information with 3rd party companies outside of the country as it exposed it to foreign law regarding government access (ie. some of those snooping powers the Americans enabled after 9/11). I would have to wonder what company or citizen in their right mind would expose their records to prying eyes. Privacy is a priviledge, not a right - don't expect it if you get sloppy.
A lot of things are done "out of habit", but if it is something that people want, let it be. is it so hard to understand that people may really **like** something even if there is some habit in this behavior? Or maybe it's just wishful thinking from the author side....
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
This is timely in that I just had a 'run-in' of sorts regarding MS Word usage and its consideration as a standard. My son is in sixth grade and, of course, has to write about 2 papers a month in his English class. He had his first official type-written paper this past couple of weeks and since we have no Windows computers and no MS Office/Word at home (all Linux, Solaris and Mac OS), we could not comply with the teacher's requirement for using MS Word with a Times New Roman font. Instead I had my son use Google Documents (which is what he's used since he started typing papers of any sort) with a Verdana font. He ended up receiving a D on the paper for not following instructions. The school has a computer lab, with Windows and MS Office, but that lab is only available to him during his assigned lab hours or after school. If he wants to use it after school, I have to pay for "After School Care" program. This kind of nonsense infuriates me. It's as if he can only write a reasonable paper if done so using MS products. Anyway, I just wrote the teacher last evening regarding coming to an agreement on things so that he doesn't suffer due to the school's devotion to MS products (a recent change as the entire school used to be Linux/OOo/etc.).
Although this might seem an unfair blow, trying to replace Word is probably considerably less important than trying to replace Excel. In finance, for example, everyone uses Excel out of habit (and due to a lack of a good replacement, too), but in many cases because replacements do not support the add-ons they are used to (e.g. Bloomberg add-ons), without which many would be useless.
This is the exact same type of hurdle that Linux faces with support for hardware. Companies don't want to support it, and it's taken a really long time to write drivers. If Excel is replaced with a good alternative, I think Word would easily follow, even if the interface were radically different.
Just a thought
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Putting a "beta" label on a product doesn't, by itself, relieve you of legal liability. That language goes in the terms of use that no one ever reads. In the end, your liability is whatever the courts say it is when you are sued.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
And when did it's interface become intuitive?
When they replaced the ribbon with a nipple.
What makes the pointing stick on a ThinkPad any more intuitive than any other way to choose an item from a GUI menu? And why would it require replacing a tabbed toolbar?
Mandating use of Word or any other commercial product for homework seems to me a form of economic discrimination. Lots of families still can't afford a PC, much less Office.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The bigger a company gets, the bigger they fall.
I have a perpetual issue with customers using Word to type in plain text data for me to import. I mean, I'll ask for a simple list of words, e.g. a category list for a web site, and I'll get a Word doc with the items inside. So I have to fire up openoffice just to get at the text.
I know, it sounds minor, but it really is a pain in the ass when I should be able to copy them straight out of the email. It at least doubles the time I spend on a simple task.
Education is the key, but it's an arduous process.
Do you have ESP?
I think that not only is the issue with the servers crashing or being compromised in some other way, but what to do when you have problems with your internet connection? Slow or flaky or just insecure, any of these scenarios disable you completely if you don't have a local copy of the file and a local editing software.
I think word probably is still the best for most. OpenOffice lacks many of its features and useability. I have used both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office and always end up going back to Microsoft Office. With OpenOffice there are all sorts of little annoyances that start to add up quickly that make it quite unuseable, for instance it would only let me drag position floating boxes and items in a document by increments of roughly twenty pixels. It doesnt have an off document scratch area in the space surrounding the document, etc. There is nothing in OpenOffice that can do what Word or Publisher does.
I also think web applications are horrid and would never use them. I dont even use web e-mail. The reason is it is slow, clumsy, if you lose your internet connection you cant work. Plus you have everything you are doing sent to a server so there is no privacy. No thanks.
Most conversation is nowadays done per email, and most docs are generated.
When do you really need a printout of a document which is not actually generated or written in DocBook or another format resp. not sent per email?
Maybe some contract or FAX, but it's not that commonly used as it was a decade ago where we wrote virtually everything using a Wordprocessor.
ODF is a much better document format than .doc or .docx. Proper mark-up like TeX is a much better document format than either.
And when you change Office yo no longer have even 95% compatability with the third party apps because they have to frig with the Office product (e.g. screen readers) rather than have the document format properly marked out to be parsed properly.
Only because they use Excel and don't use anything else.
ANYTHING ELSE would be better than Excel but nobody wants to change. They have their tools that someone 10 years ago wrote and although they don't know how it works, it is at least as right as it was 10 years ago.
It isn't the lack of replacement, it's the lack of attitude that a replacement would save time in the future. NPV is run on OTHER PEOPLE'S TIME, not the accountants.
Here's a video explanation of why you shouldn't e-mail documents. I completely agree with it. Creating twenty-five copies of the same document at various revisions is an error-prone habit.
That's a problem for a distributed version control system such as git. Using a real-time collaboration tool such as Google Docs could increase costs by $700 per person per year, as people outside the office would need to use 3G data plans to view and edit the document online instead of updating at the next Wi-Fi hotspot.
Same here. I recently had a potential employer send me an *important* document in the new Word 2007 docx format. I happened to have an older copy of Word 2003 that was unable to open it. I had to search for and install an addon that allowed older copies of Office (back to 2000) read the new format, maybe write it, I'm not sure. I know OpenOffice 2.4 couldn't open it, though I see they're out with version 3 now, and hadn't tried it. I finally manage to open the document, and what was inside?
Plain text. It had a title at the top that was underlined and centered, and the whole thing was in MS Comic Sans, but that's still plain text. There was no reason not to save it as an .rtf file, an older .doc file, or even just copy and paste into an email. But Word was used because it was there.
Also, I've seen lots of office workers exchange pictures via pasting them in Word and emailing the doc files to each other, instead of learning that pictures can also be saved as files.
I think that if anything will break users from their MS Office habits, the ribbon UI will. I found it very non-intuitive for a long time (10+ years) Office user. Frustrated with trying to get a hnadle on the UI, I finally switched over to OpenOffice and while it's *not quite* as feature rich as my old pre-ribbon MS Office, it's got a sufficiently similar UI that adapting took virtually no time at all.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
What you're saying is that ANYthing else is better than Excel, but that there is no better replacement?
So tell me this, oh genius AC... if there is no better replacement how do you expect people to use said non-existing better replacement?
Sounds a lot like you're criticizing Excel just to criticize Excel and MS. Pretty weak, actually.
There are certainly valid criticisms of Office, but that sure as hell wasn't one of 'em.
As far as a basic work processor, yes there are many others but as far as Word not being the best option for businesses and they are using it just becasue, I have to disagree. For businesses that only use basic options, maybe. But there is not many that come close when it comes to things like complex mail mergings (Google can't do), integrating with VoIP systems for business contact integration. Tying to journaling in Outlook so you can see what contacts each document has been used with, etc. There are a lot of things besides cut and paste that businesses use that other systems don't offer...yet. Its not just because we are "stuck" and "don't know what is out there".
Because with the standard $500 PC you get Works. And an old version of that.
And the compatability of Works with Word 2007 is far, FAR worse than OOo with Word 2007.
Your existing office suite isn't going to magically stop working.
It will once the activation server goes down. See all the problems with broken "purchased" tracks from DRM music stores. It also will once new copies of the non-free operating system for which the existing office suite was designed are no longer available, or when newly purchased hardware no longer comes with drivers for the operating system for which the existing office suite was designed.
And the IT cost of changing every user simultaneously is one you pay every few years with Office *anyway*.
But at least Access 2007 can run Access+VBA applications designed for previous versions of Access. OpenOffice.org Base cannot, as far as I know. This would make the retail management software package that my employer uses stop working.
Dunno about anyone else, but I think the latest MS interface junk in Office is a horrible abortion. I think/thought it was a great opportunity for competitors to step in to get experienced Office users to give them a try. Can OO.o v3 close the deal?
(a OO.o 'skin' that emulated the shortcuts and menu structure of Office 2000 would be helpful in this regard..)
It is maddening to get e-mails with a Word document attached that is just text. I've never understood why that can't just be put in the e-mail. Or when I get something as a document that I'm not editing or to edit, why not a PDF.
Don't even start me on the image thing.
When I switched to a Mac, I dumped Office completely and went cold turkey into iWork- I have not regretted it. Pages' interface is less cluttered, more sensical, it runs better than Office on a Mac, and I've had no problem with file conversions as I share docs with others in my workspace. Mac users- ditch Office, iWork is the way to go!
Are you serious, if anyone has updated ms office to 2007, its totally different. How could anyone be familiar with it. I use openoffice to make diagrams now because word is now a pain in the butt.
15 days ago, on this website:
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230
Yes, you can mark me as troll or flamebait but you know as well as I do that OO will not survive 2009.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Microsoft could maintain their advantage with Word/Office if they released an open source toolset for providing self/private-hosted online groupware which integrates with the Office suite.
It could be a subset of Sharepoint which allows the users to edit in Word, but save to an online managed repository with versioning, permissions and group editing tools (ie: limited workflows).
They don't need to provide the extensive framework that Sharepoint provides to enterprise customers... just the basics needed by an average office pool.
Make it open source with an API so other word processing docs can also work with it to avoid any embrace and extend issues, and have it store documents in the ODF so it is fully cross-platform, etc.
Then MS can use their leadership in the market and their customer support contracts to keep selling the Office Suite which is their number one software. Other's will try to compete and may get a few niche markets if they can create custom office apps for industry or extend the online API for specific workflows... (if they can compete with the full Sharepoint stack) but MS will dominate and for very good reason. At the same time, they will provide for future proofing and be a good software citizen which interoperates with all other options.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Don't even start me on the image thing.
If you want to send a number of images in a format that's easy to look at, putting them in some sort of word processor document (doc,odf whatever) is quite convienient - the receiver can just open one document and scroll through. Sending as individual image attachments makes it more of a pain to look through them all.
The licensing costs of Excel are simply not an issue in financial companies (a vanishing fraction of what it costs to keep the desk operating); also, we don't use any of the fancier functionality of Excel - any fancy stuff traders need, such as solvers, option pricers, etc is written in C++ and made available as an Excel plugin. So Excel is merely used as a GUI framework with mild number-crunching support, and it's really great for that. Switching would simply mean redoing all of the C++-to-plugin code, for no benefit that I can see.
Nobody in finance uses Excel for research - it's all Matlab or R, with some C++ thrown in.
Can you give me a single reason *why* finance folks (of which I am one) should switch away from Excel?
Do you honestly think that -any- software "vendor" out there that's large enough to provide the kind of word-processor you need/would-be-using really gives half-a-hoot about a feature request or but report from little old you (or me)?
Truth be told, the non-support you claim to be getting from the OOo community (assuming you actually filed bug reports and all that) is probably far superior to the non-aknoledgement-of-non-support you'd get from IBM or Mircosoft....
That's a much better habit.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
User I dream about smoking writes
Thank you, but I don't need to know about that aspect of your sex life or drug habit as the case may be.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Word is mostly used for churning out throwaway documents. Excel is used for long term storage of data - and there's a _lot_ of VBA code out there pulling data out of ancient spreadsheets.
My Journal
Ah, so can your ANYTHING_ELSE do a quick join on two rectangular areas in the spreadsheet, and dump the result into the spreadsheet?
How good is ANYTHING_ELSE's pivot table support?
And no, I don't want to have to mess around with a full relational DB to get the above done when it's just a couple of clicks in Excel.
Familiarity to users and legacy investments are definitely things to consider when trying to decide your best option, aren't they?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Many companies block Google's tools since that would mean storing company info outside of the company.
And precisely what is their objection? If they have M$ crap on their servers or workstations, they're letting outside people in. Try reading the licenses some time, including the service pack licenses. When you see it, bricks will be shat.
Office 97 on Wine runs faster than native OpenOffice.org. You can get Office 97 cheap on eBay.
On our intranet, e.g, there is a web page on "Instructions how to setup a certain version control software". Step 1 is a link that throws a setup_procedure.doc at you, which in turn needs to be opened locally in MS Word to read further instructions.
And early next year, someone will post a comment on Slashdot claiming Google copied the idea from Microsoft.
And get modded informative.
This space intentionally left blank.
Hi -I'm going to critique the article itself:
It's flimsy, light, and 'trendy' - not exactly the result of hard-core study. Not too many concrete reasons are given as to why online collaboration tools are *better* or fill specific business needs compared to word.
Despite its warts, Word *works* and people generally know how to use it. It's tested, it's a known entity, businesses know how much it costs, etc. They're not ready to experiment yet.
Obviously online services have a totally different set of pros & cons, but this article doesn't really seem to address those.
Even if online suites were clearly better suited to business than locally installed software, *this* article does not make a suitable case for switching.
My concern is C-level execs who see this kind of stuff and make sweeping decisions for their company based on a trendy 'puff' piece like this.
I would advise them to go ask Gartner or someone who actually knows how to research this stuff. :)
I have a perpetual issue with customers using Word to type in plain text
Worse, I've had 'technical' people take my 'txt' formatted documentation and paste them badly into Word, as it's more 'professional'.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Oh, definitely, if you're doing a presentation-type thing, where picture size and placement is important, by all means use a word processor, or even a PowerPoint-like thing if you know the receiving party can view it. Even a PDF would be good.
A quick paste and save of a lolcat is another matter entirely.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Doesn't Open Office support .doc files and Times New Roman font?
Indeed, it does. Open Office's ".doc" support was miserable in OO 1.0, almost OK in OO 2.0 (certainly good enough for a student paper), and has been cleaned up a bit more in OO 3.0, now that the spec for ".doc" files is available.
Can't speak for Google Docs. The browser font situation still sucks, ten years on.
Which is more than £75.
Here you go:
http://www.addintools.com/
That will replace the bewildering ribbon with a proper menu, the way Dog intended it it to be.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Also, I've seen lots of office workers exchange pictures via pasting them in Word and emailing the doc files to each other, instead of learning that pictures can also be saved as files.
Sigh. Got a Word doc from a missionary friend that I support over Christmas. Opened it up and it was a picture of him and the family - no text or anything else.
Do you have ESP?
Sorry, but fail.
Online doesn't mean better. It just means online. If you have your data all at hand offline, there is no reason to be online. Online is good for sharing, mostly in realtime. But unless your data needs to be realtime, online isn't always the answer. Free is the same way, sure open office is nice and can do just about the same as MS word. There are the non windows geeks and the windows geeks and the battle of what is better will continue forever most likely. But the thing is, it doesn't matter. People shouldn't have to learn several different software packages to do the same thing, no matter how small the learning curve is. And that is the point. Windows and Office have already set the standard, 80+% of the business world uses them, and they where first to main stream it (like lotus was before them).
Bottle water is just water, bottle water will never replace tap water and that is what MS is, the tap water of the world.
I say this because of a horror story my mother recently related to me, and it makes a good example for why people use these under-performing Windows applications: her work is still using IE 5 because only it is compatible with the software they have to use in order to run their business. Did you hear that? I'm not kidding. They are forced to use INTERNET EXPLORER FIVE. This almost makes me cry every time I think about it.
DocX? The one and only Open XML.
I couldn't agree more
The ribbon is such a bug bear to users here that I routinely remove Office 2007 from new PC's bought with it bundled and replace it with 2003. Users hate it, they feel they haven't got the time at work to be learning a new user interface when they could (and should) be just doing the work
Cool, hip and trendiness have no place in business, and especially not in a time of global recession where we need above all to be maximising productivity. What we need is a sensible Microsoft producing evolving series' of software in a predictable and incredibly boring manner. I want each new version of Office to be the same, but better. If it's completely different from the user's perspective, as Office 2007 is, then it's really not Office any more, it's something else, and if I wanted something else, I wouldn't have been using Office all these years.
Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills.
Companies, especially non-technical ones, are terrified of purchasing software that comes with no support.
Its the same reason "Microsoft Beats GNU/Linux In Schools" (Another Slashdot story). There aren't many school districts willing to dump a well known industry standard for a package with no-one to take responsibility for it.
Until supported open source software like RedHat is available, Microsoft will stick around unhithered. Even RedHat, although, comes with the cost of support -- and given the academic deals schools get for purchasing Microsoft suites, the price difference may not be very moving.
And to be an honest OpenOffice user, Office 2007 still blows away any GNU office suite I've used in the past, including the one that used to come with KDE (::tear, the good ol' days::). That Math plugin for OPenOffice, although, rocks.