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."

Comments

Re:File Compatibility, not Habit

[deniable]

That's an improvement. In previous versions, I had to use OpenOffice to 'repair' documents that Word couldn't open. And yeah, different versions or even changing printers can make Word documents go flaky. (Of course, people not tweaking every little formatting parameter would make that less of a problem.)

Re:Googles playbook

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Have to agree! It surprises me given that Google do (or did) sell application servers for search, they didn't do the same with their Apps suite; I'm sure loads of corporates would be happy to purchase their own box with support.

BS

[gx5000]

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.

Re:Of course its out of habit

[Lumpy]

I found that recompiling OO.o (it's a major BITCH! to do BTW)

and changing things to say "word" and "excel" and the icons... in other words faking it to be the office suite was enough to fool a large swath of the office to believe they were using microsoft word and excel. just a different "version". we called it a service pack upgrade and swallowed it whole.

It's mostly physiological with users. The same thing happens when you IE skin Firefox.

Sore spot with me.

[rindeee]

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.).

Re:Next up:

[betterunixthanunix]

1. Ubuntu? Thanks, but I'll take a certified system like RHEL, SLES, or Solaris for government work. The certifications do actually represent something, even though I am sure a dozen or so slashdotters will have stories about some certified system being compromised (responses to compromise are part of the certification) or some non-certified system never being compromised (possible, nobody even denied this could happen).
2. FREE does not mean "zero dollars." A switch to Ubuntu would be pricey, and while it is likely to save money in the long run, the up front cost is a factor and is likely higher than the yearly cost of running the various other systems the US government uses. My state is facing a budget crisis, I really don't think we need a mandate to switch to Ubuntu on the table when we are already looking at cutting funding for schools in the best case scenario.
3. Judging by the quality of code I see out of my own classmates, at one of the top 50 universities in the US, I do not think I am very comfortable with the idea of government systems being run by college students. Canonical has not really demonstrated that they employ top notch programmers either, and beyond that, Canonical is not an American company (they are registered on the Isle of Man), so they are not in a position to deal with sensitive government systems. We have enough problems with government systems, let's not compound it.

What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems. Let state and local governments figure out the cheapest way to implement such a standard. Really, it is irrelevant whether or not the government uses a free software operating system, as long as government documents are not in a proprietary format and as long as the government is not wasting money paying for its software (proprietary or free). What is needed is easier communication between different government departments and between the government and the people; the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.