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.
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!!!!
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.
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 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)
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.
Go ahead, mod me offtopic, but somebody has to do it. http://begthequestion.info/
Actually, Microsoft Office (especially Powerpoint, but also Excel and Word) are "better" than Open Office. There are readily available training materials. In fact, if you've got certain classes of Microsoft licensing, you can get the on-demand online training for your entire organization for next to nothing. And the integrations with 3rd party applications are a key feature. It doesn't matter if Open Office does 95% of what Microsoft Office does, if those key connectors that important departments or divisions need aren't available for it. And if you're the IT department, and you're still going to have a sizable portion of your organization using the Microsoft suite due to those issues (anything more than 5% to 10%, if they're key customers), why would you want to take the time to train your internal support staff to support both? There are probably 30 other applications that don't duplicate Office's functionality that they need to support.
If you're starting from scratch, and you're not tying together different pieces of software, or relying on add-ons, it's easier. But the typical Slashdot reader seems to be completely unaware that that's a problem.
And I still maintain that the rapid adoption of Sharepoint is going to keep MS Office entrenched. Sorry, but the current version of Sharepoint is really, really well done.
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.
its faster to teach someone to use a specific program then to teach someone a generic way of thinking that can be applied again and again...
think of the modern education system as programming biological robots and one get a nice mental image of what both government and big biz wants us to be...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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"
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"
Every one of the competing clones has the same broken idea that spreadheets, documents and databases are different things
A spreadsheet is a reactive program with its expressions in a cell grid. A document is a tree containing text and markup. A database is a set of relations with constraints on them. What do you consider "broken" about the differences between these data types?
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.
Palm trees and 8
"That said, OO doesn't meet our needs as well, and has some memory issues (20000 PDF conversions later, it crashes)."
That is a HUGE number of conversions to be doing with a GUI based program. I do not know what your workflow is, but it sounds like you really need to be invoking ghostscript through some sort of shell script, or maybe in a Perl or AWK program. It is possible that you will actually see efficiency improvements, as this approach may allow for greater automation. As I said, I do not know your workflow, but this really sounds like a case where a little bit of shell scripting can go a long way.
Palm trees and 8
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
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.
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.
Since it is open source it is harder for us to get timely issue resolution.
What kind of timeliness in issue resolution were you getting from MS?
That's a much better habit.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
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.
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the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
I definitely agree with this. People get so wrapped up in the question as to whether the source code is free/open (which admittedly can be an important issue) that they forget about the issue of "standards". If you use open standards and open protocols, then it gives everyone the freedom to use whatever software they want without fear of vendor lock-in. Even if some particular person or group is using software that's completely proprietary and secretive about its inner-workings, you'll still be able to communicate, interoperate, and share information.
At the very least, I agree with attempts to ensure that all government documents are disseminated in open formats. Insofar as the government distributes word documents, they're reenforcing a Microsoft monopoly, and I don't believe that is appropriate. The definition of what is "open" shouldn't just be "some body certified it as such," but rather the law should have specific conditions, including surrendering the right to ever sue for patent infringement for implementing the standard.
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems.
That's a great start. The problem is that Microsoft will simply subvert the standards process to its own ends and become the de facto standard. They've done it before.
Microsoft only likes standards when it can define the standard.
Other than that, I would highly support the concept.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.