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Hands-On Preview of Microsoft Office 2010
Barence writes "Microsoft has announced full details of Office 2010 and its plans for an accompanying suite of online applications, and PC Pro has been given special access to a technical preview. Contributing Editor Simon Jones gives his initial verdict on the new suite, concluding that there's 'still a long way to go in terms of fit and finish ... but overall Microsoft has made good strides in increasing usability, cohesiveness and collaboration.' This is followed by detailed first looks at Word 2010, Excel 2010, Outlook 2010 and PowerPoint 2010, with Outlook certainly looking to be the greatest beneficiary. And finally, a gallery of screenshots shows off all the new interface touches in Office 2010, including Outlook's conversation view, Word's picture-editing function and the new cut-and-paste preview option."
Any traction on solving or at least improving Microsoft's ODF implementation? The last time I checked, there were serious issues with the implementation.
By the way, how does Office 2007's "Save-As-PDF" feature compare to the real thing?
me neither.
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
wine already supports office. Winedoors is free and makes installing office dead easy.
Crossover office costs money but makes it even more brain-dead easy.
I find that hard to believe. How many of those people they asked actually used office as a mission critical application in their day to day use? In my admittedly small sample, nobody that I work with at all enjoys using the ribbons, which is about 5 that I have spoken to about it. The majority of people have Office 2003 put on instead, only those who are reluctant to change software on their computers leave it on.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Good Lord, the business hardly deployed Office 2007 with big troubles, we just got used to the new interface absolute madness and yet again more changes :(
Will this crazy running for "the new" ever end?
Microsoft has long been promoting "good enough" approach to things. It isn't the most secure ... it is good enough. It isn't the most robust ... it is good enough. It isn't the most productive ... it is good enough.
This is the Achilles heal of Microsoft. With Windows XP and Office since 2000 or even 2003, has been "good enough". I can't think of ANYTHING Microsoft can offer in Win 7 or Office 2010 that I would actually use. And changing how things work, just for the sake of changing how they work, is counter productive.
In early 2003 I made the statement that 2008 was going to be the first sign of Microsoft's demise as tech leader. The Storm has hit, and is now ravaging Microsoft. Google is building Chrome OS (which I would assume is tied to Android ... somewhere), Open Office is very usable, Wine is getting to the point of being solid, Linux is appearing on desktops, Webservices, mobile devices (iPhone, Blackberry, Android) etc.
You can see the panic at Microsoft in their web services division, from the search engines changes to Live and now to Bing. You can see the panic in the OS and Office with the huge changes in the UI to cover up that really nothing has changed since 2000.
Microsoft is suffering from the "good enough" syndrome. Everything they have made for the last 6 or 8 years is "good enough" and when Vista comes along and changes things just to change things, people buck against it. You'll see more of the same with Office.
I honestly think one of the reasons Gates left, was because he saw the writing on the wall, and got out while the getting was good.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Word's been around, what, 20 years? Guys, if you want to provide maximum usability to use users, leave it alone. We've all figured out how the app works, what the keyboard shortcuts are, where in each menu our most-used commands are, and how to use mail merge. STOP CHANGING IT. Every time you change how Word works, all you're doing is decreasing my usability and needlessly taking away time I could otherwise spend doing actual productive work.
Full disclosure: I've been trying to avoid Office for the past year or so, relying on Apple's Pages instead - in part simply because Word is a bloated beast, and in part because Microsoft just keeps pointlessly adding useless crap and changing things to give the illusion of "innovation".
#DeleteChrome
â¦but can PowerPoint incorporate BOTH a landscape and portrait setting in the same slideshow yet? Or can users rearrange the Quick Access Toolbar by dragging the icons around instead of the retarded way of going into the Options/Customize area? Or Excel open with the page break showing, as in dotted lines showing the margins?
... for software that really isn't needed these days. Other than a one-off printed letter, what place does a word processing document have in today's world of Wikis and such? Same with spreadsheets. Great for high school and college labs, and quick what-if stuff, but outside of that, should they really be used (don't get me started on the number of spreadsheet 'databases' or printable tables are out there).
...is the new Clippy. If you want people to use Office, you need to get rid of it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I could have been happy using WordPerfect 5.1 for the rest of my life -- it did everything I need a word processor to do.
-kgj
The last good version of Microsoft Word was Word 5.1 for the Mac, and that was over 17 years ago! They should stop throwing all the garbage in there and just make it extensible with plug-ins like Photoshop or a web browser.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Im not too sure whats the difference, but Outlook has had thread support for years too. So this is probably a fancier rehash of the same deal, or maybe natively integrated with Exchange or something.
I found it really interesting to hear that Microsoft is pushing so hard for web-based solutions, as well as incorporating network features into the local client. They seem to be adopting all the best features of Google Apps/Writely and putting extra polish on them.
For instance, anyone who's used Google Apps knows how bad the cross-compatibility is with Office documents so this alone will be the main decider for most businesses. Also, Google Apps' interface is rudamintary and the applications are utterly worthless for formatting documents for print, so these are areas MS can really excel in the cloud. It's also neat to see Microsoft incorporate collaborative edits of a single document - this was Google's main differentiator until now as it was infinitely better than Sharepoint's check-out system.
Most importantly for non-US businesses, Microsoft offers locally installed, locally hosted server solutions which means you don't have to entrust your private data to the cloud, the PATRIOT Act, or man-in-the-middle attacks. Also, your workplace doesn't stop if your WAN connection goes down.
I predict these features will be of little value to small businesses and home users who may opt for cheap or free competing products, but MS has a very good handle on how the workplace is evolving and becoming more distributed and this awareness will be very attractive for mid-to-large businesses.
The contraction of "it is" called. It wants its apostrophe back.
Threaded mail has been in Outlook since at least Outlook 2000. Conversation view is more like Gmail's "threads".
Go somewhere random
The ability to group messages by conversation has been in Outlook for as long as I've been using it (which is since 2003) - probably longer, though, as Outlook Express had it since the first version that came with Win98. I'm not sure how this is new by any measure...
Is anyone else thinking that we may not have seen this early preview if it hadn't been for last week's announcement from Google of the upcoming Chrome OS, twisting Microsoft's arm into announcing something, anything at all?
So you mean to say that in a way, innovation as a whole is just limited to one feature?
Outlook has supported threaded discussion views for email and post folders since the 2000 version. Here's a walk through for 2003. First hit on Google searching for 'outlook threaded view'
While threaded mode is useful for some things, there are other nice ways to visualize your stuff on Outlook that I like.
View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.
A quick switch to Message Timeline view is also extremely useful in those situations where someone says "it's an email from 03/12/70" or something like that and you want to look quickly at the entire sequence sorted by message rather than simply by date.
The "Show in groups" thing is priceless as a visual aide to stuff that's happened in the last few weeks.
I think Outlook is an example of Microsoft's better software efforts. It has its quirks and limitations of course, but overall it's far better than most other mail clients I've used in the past 15 years. And I'm not even considering Exchange integration here.
Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I've tried using a threaded view with different email clients over the years and I always switch back. I don't understand why. I've spent a lot of time on Outlook so that may be why I could care less about threading. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the entire thread is appended to the end of each new mail I get in the thread. That is, unless someone in the chain deliberately doesn't include it in a reply.
What I have grown to love is the way gmail does threading. It's like a hybrid between what Outlook does (or doesn't do) and threading. I have the thread there in case I need it but the message appears at the top of my inbox all the way to the left.
MG
Outlook has supported threaded mail for a long time. The feature they were trying to highlight was the ability to condense the content of the thread to a single (or small number of) message when much of the content in the replies is the same (ie the previous sender's message quoted back in a reply). Therefore you could look at the top-level of the thread and possibly read the whole thread without having to go through several messages, most of which contain the previous messages quoted over and over again.
How much value this has to most users and whether or not it actually works very well I don't know, but the idea that Outlook didn't have a threaded view before this is at best laughable, especially since a quick search would tell you how to do it in the last 4 or so versions of the program.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
First Question: Does it run on XP?
Would be the first time that MS has tried to force an OS upgrade.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Exchange / Outlook is a pretty substantial requirement for every company I've ever worked for.
- Dan
1: It takes away valuable vertical screen real estate and cannot be repositioned to less valuable side areas.
2: It changes based on what it's Application Telepathy thinks you are doing.
3: You are not even offered the option of backwards compatibility to the old, customizable, fixed menuing system -- Microsoft dictates that they know what's best for you!
Can forced Dvorak keyboards with no QWERTY option be far behind?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I know this wouldn't be too helpful to openoffice and the FOSS world in general in terms of getting a leg up on native format overlords but it would help me not just deploy it in a large office by saving myself some clicks as I'm running around installing it but it would also enable me to hand out a CD to someone with an openoffice installation on it if I could somehow modify it to set the default save formats to Microsoft's. I also realize there's a risk such users should know, that they may lose certain formatting in doing this (and maybe I'd want to encourage them to crank out PDFs on final drafts), but most people just don't have the technical acumen to change these settings themselves and would have little interest in an editor that would only save a new document in an MS format if they went out of their way to specify it each time. Being able to double click an icon, type something, hit save and email to someone else who will then be able to open it with or without openoffice without having to do any extra steps would be a strong selling point.
So is there any way, a simple way without having to sift through all the source code, to modify some kind of openoffice installer to use ms formats by default? Maybe something like this exists already?
Ideally MS would be kind enough to support oo formats...
While I'm posting here's a link for MS fonts and another for Vista fonts for OO, works on all platforms OO works on according to what I found on google just now. Oh yeah, and back to my question, how about modifying an installer package to toss in fonts like this? Again, dealing with people who can barely click through a simple installation, not people who know where to find the basic settings of this kind of software.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
Between Windows, Doors, and Offices, it's pretty clear that programmers need to get outside more.
Who cares?
Why bother
...but you wouldn't think so looking through some of these comments. Office works real well with MOSS (Paid version of SharePoint); which works real nice on a Active Directory and SQL Server; which is only realistic on Windows Server. When I say works well, I mean your grandmother could get it running.
Office on it's own is missing the point really; documents should never stay on just one machine.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Office.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsoft have said (in the video here and on here) it supports Firefox and Safari (so presumably Chrome) just as well as IE. No mention of Opera but I see no reason as to why it wouldn't work. I think the video mentions that it works on Macs too.
Just which 3rd party app are you referring to, and what in particular makes it crappy to you?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Congratulations on getting modded up though. My theory that mod points are being increasingly farmed out to rhesus monkeys and squirrels on steroids continues to pan out.
Dude your saying good things about MS. Let me get on my other five /. accounts so i can mod you down.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
I have long argued that Office '97 was the best version they ever put out. All the features you need, very few you don't, and a decent enough UI and the ability to turn off AutoCorrect. I discovered OpenOffice a few years back, realized how similar it was to '97, and haven't looked back.
twitter? Is that you? :)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Where I work, our users are all happily using Office 2003 with no immediate desire to change. However, if Outlook 2010 gets proper IMAP support and Samba 4 is a bit more mature by then we'll move our whole user base over in flash as we'll finally be able to move to postfix/Samba4/LDAP and dump Exchange/AD thereby realising our dream of transitioning all of our back end to an open-source stack.
The GP was bashing Microsoft. Welcome to Slashdot!
So install it and quit complaining.
I wasn't complaining -- I was (worse yet) sighing wistfully ...
But seriously: thanks, I hadn't actually thought of installing it. But it might be a kick, for old time's sake. (Hell, I'm still fond of BattleZone, no matter how good the Quakes and Half-Lifes get.) And thanks for posting that link.
Well, yeah, that's all true. And I'd quickly run into these shortcomings and get fed up, if I spent much time reviving an archaic program.
Still, back in the day, it was the schiznitz.
-kgj
You're right -- I've succumbed to maudlin sentimentality about archaic software.
You wouldn't happen to have any spare GOTO statements, would you? I haven't seen mine for decades but I'm feeling kind of homesick for the good old days ....
-kgj
Especially because Reveal Codes was so much faster for fixing formatting problems than Word to this day.
Yes! You have hit the nail square on the head, my friend! Reveal Codes, that's what I immediately and sorely missed when my then-employer switched from WordPerfect to Word!
-kgj
Word has had a style inspector since Office 2003 (or possibly Office XP).
Thx!
-kgj
" ... WP was gross overkill for just about everyone ... "
Point well taken: even WP 5.1 had plenty of features and functions (a less charitable critic might say "bloat") of no interest to me.
-kgj
Is that they had a more conformant version in an add-on product.
Then when it came to their built-in, they nerfed it.
Worse, the bit they nerfed was, effectively, "until we have something, do what Microsoft Excel does".
Yes, Microsoft couldn't even manage their own product implementation in their own product...
All the features you need...
Word 2000's 'track changes' feature is notably better than the on in '97, and PowerPoint introduced a presenter view in 2003 (even if it was sort of crappy at the time). The former is "nice to have", but the latter is almost a "must-have" feature for software of that nature.
(And OpenOffice still has neither, though there is an extension that gives Impress an okay presenter view.)
office 97 had enough features already. the bloat continues ever forward.
Yes, but you don't understand. Office 97 will no longer be supported by Windows [Version #] and Office [Version #] will not open files from Office 97. Moreover the new computer you got comes with Windows [Version # Home Edition] and you can not install Windows 2000 on it to run Office 97 because the computer won't let you. So, you see, you must now use Windows [Version # Home Edition (or better)] requiring an upgrade to Office [Version #]. New features don't matter because no one knows how to use them anyway. It's all about the upgrade cycle, which somehow we are supposed to embrace, mostly because our clueless coworkers are afraid of OpenOffice and the version of Office they run will not save to ODF by default and, even if you can manage to persuade your clueless coworkers to save in ODF, [Office Version #] will probably save a non-conforming document anyway that purposefully doesn't open correctly in OpenOffice.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Guys, I can't say I'm a fan of MS but I have to say I think I've found the next killer app. Or at least, killer app combo.
OneNote 2007 plus SharePoint
It's like everything I've wanted in a wiki. Collaborative editing, automatic synchronization between team members, drag *anything* into it (text, emails, screenshots, files), with easy-to-use annotation. Write anywhere, on anything. It's easy to reorganize, easy to search and plain easy to use. Editing a OneNote page is just all drag+drop plus familiar Word Processor-like controls. Every Windows app can now "print" to a virtual printer device that turns anything into a OneNote page as well.
Bonus screen-capturing made easy (windowkey+s lets me snap anything I want from the screen into the clipboard), and a "live" mode that does the whole realtime digital whiteboard thing so I can hold meetings with remote users and we can all see what we're talking about.
I'll agree I hate the new UI of Office 2007. Can't stand it. And I'm not a fan of SharePoint on its own (I find it cumbersome to use). But I have to say I see big things for OneNote (on SharePoint) in the future. Once set up, the OneNote folders do all the synchronization/checkout/commits transparently while keeping my local copy working. There are a few things that could use a little bit more work (I don't like how something can only be a folder OR a folder group, and not both) but I see this as the next killer app in enterprise organizations.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Good enough is often as close as you are going to get for a massive user base.
Also, I see that you don't even credit any of the "competition" for rising to the the lowly standard you castigate Microsoft for settling on.
"I'll see your crappy 'good enough' Office and raise you with my 'very useable' Open Office". LOL
Not sure about the Win 7 file copy thing (or what it has to do with Office 10), but Excel has had 1,048,576 rows since Office 2007.
TODO: Insert witty sig
>Please give me a version that works for what I need to do.
.
LOL. Microsoft stopped responding to non-business users over a decade ago.
.
Seriously, if you're not selling widgets to wankers on the web, Microsoft would like to pretend you don't exist. This seems to hold especially true for Windows developers, not like I'm bitter or anything.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"The Conversation Clean-Up tool will condense long email chains into summaries of the conversation, allowing you to catch up with all the key information without having to open dozens of different messages individually." http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/261430/everything-you-need-to-know-about-microsoft-office-2010.html>
Congratulations Microsoft. Welcome to the 21st century. 'Bout time.
I find OpenOffice quirky and unreliable. It often crashes for me.
2001 called and wants that review back. I've used OO on Linux, Windows XP, and Vista. On old machines, brand new ones and everything in between. And the number of times it's crashed on me or here at the office where we also use it....
0
Quirky you can argue, especially if you're used to something else. But if it crashes your computer, then your computer has much bigger problems.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Our company rolled out an upgrade from Microsoft Windows 2000 + Office 2002 to Vista + Office 2007 last fall. Needless to say, it was not exactly the smoothest of transitions... so we have the Ribbon, which is creating a polarizing user experiences between new and old users. Powerusers in Excel are completely exasperated, filled with hate towards MS and actually asking for Office XP downgrades just so they can get the toolbars back. It now takes 4 clicks to do things that used to be 1 click, or none because the keyboard commands were actually stable and not tab sensitive...
Personally, I'm coping with it, because I don't have an option. So, embracing the ribbon, it's bugging the heck out of me because the whole damn thing is anti-intuitive:
Thank you Microsoft, for helping me where I didn't know I needed help.
Outlook has had threaded conversations since *at least* 2003, maybe further back (that was when I first looked for the feature). The main differences in 2010 are twofold: messages that are part of the same conversation but spread across multiple folders are shown together (including your sent messages when viewing a thread in your inbox, for example), and redundent messages (ones where the response incorporates the original message, making the original redundent) are hidden by default (they can be shown if you please) which helps prevent one long thread from filling up the whole screen and being difficult to navigate between cranches of.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The geek hasn't got a clue - and you can't slam one into his head with a twenty-pound sledge.
Software Best Sellers In Business [Updated Hourly]
1 MS Office Home & Student 2007. 931 Days In The Top 100.
4 MS Office Home & Student 2008. - Mac. 609 Days
7 Outlook 2007. 930 Days
17 MS Office Small Business 2007 Full Version. 400 Days
18 MS Office Pro 2007 Full Version. 494 Days
19 MS Office Standard 2007 Full Version. 916 Days.
23 MS Office Pro 2007 Upgrade. 930 Days.
24 MS Office Small Business 2007 Upgrade. 575 Days.
26 of the top 100 Business Best Sellers in Software at Amazon are MS Office 2007 products.
WordPerfect X4 Home&Student at $70 comes in at #60.
50 Days In the The Top 100.
I noticed that someone tagged this article with "bloat".
Ignoring the fact that this is not the proper way to tag an article, they really should read Joel Spolsky's excellent article "Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth".
To quote (emphasis mine):
A lot of software developers are seduced by the old "80/20" rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features. In the last 10 years I have probably heard of dozens of companies who, determined not to learn from each other, tried to release "lite" word processors that only implement 20% of the features. This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words.
What you consider to be bloat, many other people consider to be essential functionality.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Outlook's had Threaded View for decades. I don't exactly know what "conversation view" is, but it's something new.
But good job posting your ignorant bullshit for everybody to read. I guess it's easier to lie about what features Outlook has than to check your facts. Why do people mod up posts that *make shit up*?
Comment of the year
If you're using styles (which you should be, I don't care what you think is a good exception to this statement because it's not a good exception), Reveal Formatting in Word gives a lot of the same functionality.
Useful -- thanks.
I've been dabbling with styles in Word lately, thinking it would be a sensible thing to do. But I hadn't noticed Reveal Formatting.
-kgj
I use Office 2003 and I'm not intending to stop - because nobody is making me stop.
Come on now, folks, let MS do what they like with their new stuff. Why the hell should you care?
If you want the new stuff and like it, fine. It won't stop my 6-year old version working, no more than it will stop my 6-year old microwave oven working.
I've tried the ribbon and rejected it. So what. I still have a decent, intuitive, unencumbered version of Office. Hard luck on those that haven't. :shrug:
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
We're still getting used to Office 2007 and now they bring along Office 2010???? I wonder, with no attempt at flaming Microsoft, just who the fuck is going to buy this given the current state of the economy? What exactly will Office 2010 do that we couldn't live without? This actually applies to almost all Office versions, since a good 90% of what we use it for could just as easily be done with Office 2000 or OOo or even Google Apps for that matter.
I appreciate Microsoft's burning need to try and come up with new features in order to justify the high costs of its products, but this is just ridiculous. This is like the PC magazines making wild claims about new exclusive content on some or other product only for it to be the same rubbish as before, with a new type face and different images.
I found that it helps if you think of a Word document as you would HTML and CSS.
My experience is similar. I found myself wanting to use Dreamweaver as a word processor, because I like the CSS interface. HTML/CSS is kind of clumsy for business docs; but thinking about page markup put me on the trail of Word styles.
-kgj
Damn you Corel for destroying a perfectly good and lean product.
Yeah, WP 5.1 was a good lean product, although I try to cut Corel some slack because they're the scrappy underdog.
-kgj
here's some "features" in Office 2007 that I hope they fix:
1. in the Outlook 2007 journal, document edits are not logged if the document is stored on a network drive.
99% of my work documents are on a network server. When i go to fill in my weekly time sheet (so I can get paid), I go to the journal to review what my work was, and there's nothing there! (inb4 you didn't do any work)
2a. Copying a spreadsheet chart from excel to word can not be done by drag-and-drop.
2b. copy / pasting a chart from excel to word pastes it as a vector image. a) you can not edit the chart as a OLE object in the word document, and b) text formatting on the axes gets screwed up.
I *do* like the ribbon interface and the context formatting menu that pops up when you select text.
Interface issues aside, perhaps the most surprising functional change between Office 2003 and Office 2007 was that they took away the ability to click "Insert -> Picture -> From Scanner or Camera". In Word 2007, it's necessary to save a scanned image as a file (outside of Word), and then locate/insert the file (within Word).
I would be pleased if I could scan into a document directly again.
Their tool bars are becoming much like Lotus Notes. I had to use it at my last job, and it was bewildering to say the very least! Of course, I had no formal training on it, but it should be intuitive...right?
If Excel 2010 is getting Sparklines, does that mean someone at Microsoft has read Tufte? Could we finally be getting default graphs that don't break every rule of good data graphics? It's probably too much to hope for, but I can dream...
Visit the
View -> Arrange By -> Conversation on OLK2003 is essentially the same as GMail mode, for example.
I use Outlook every day in my work (and I have it open right now). I did what you indicated and the "conversation" view does not look *anything* like Google's view.
For one, the messages I sent are not displayed (as they are "saved" in the SentItems folder), second, the messages from the same "conversation" are in shown in a flat list (i.e. wihtout bleeding). Moreover, you can not order by any other column once you choose "conversation" view.
In summary, it sucks.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
In Outlook, make receipts selectable on a per-message basis. As it stands now, it's all or nothing, so if a user thinks they need a receipt once, they end up requesting them for -every- stupid little email for ever and ever.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Word's picture-editing function...
I thought Word was a word processor...
Talk about feeping creaturism. No wonder Microsoft can't write a goddamn plaintext editor that can run in < 128MB ram without crashing[0]...
[0]Yes, that's hyperbole.
[quote]a) they maintain copyright for another 90 years b) the old product worked fine c) nobody else can fix any problems d) they have to buy another one that will have the same problems in 3-5 years[/quote] WIth regards to your items:
a) Irrelevant to this topic - who cares? It's a new copyright btw. Honestly in 90 years who will care about win3.1...who cares about win3.1 right now?
b) So does a 1980 toyota corolla but look at where we are now - upgrades, new features, etc
c) This doesn't make sense. Rephrase?
d) They don't have to buy a new one. You can still use office 2003 and someone using office 2010 can read it...and a new version with new/updated features is not a problem.
Unless you have more information to flesh out, which makes sense, it seems like you are trolling.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Or at least take a break to play Portal.
xlsy?