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A New Version of MS Office Every 90 Days
Billly Gates writes "It appears Microsoft is following Chrome's agile development model like Mozilla did. At a recent tech conference, Kurt DelBene, president of the Office division, said they have mechanisms in place to update Office on a quarterly basis. Of course to get these new wondrous features and bugfixes you have to have a subscription to Office 365. Are the customers who most prefer subscriptions (corporate) going to want new things in the enterprise every 90 days? It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation. At the same time, the accountants notice significant savings by keeping I.T. costs down with decade/semi decade updates to their images, while I.T. only puts out fires in between. Will this bring change to that way of doing things, or will Microsoft's cloud offerings with outsourced Exchange and Sharepoint make up for it using cost savings and continually updated software in the enterprise?"
There was no agile development before Chrome or what? There's pretty much no comparison here.
This space for rent.
MS has finally realized that waterfall development isn't the best for consumers; now only if they'd offer it at an affordable price...
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I work for a company where all our internal sales and crm software is internally developed. A user or customer requests a feature and our revs will implement it in a month or two
Squeeze the magic hen for the last few golden eggs.
I don't know quite what to make of this. I got used to skipping every other generation of Office, especially MS-Word, back sometime around the time of Word for Windows 2.0 (which was great) and Word for Windows 6.0 (the next version, which was not... who knows what happened to 3, 4, or 5.) But then later, Office/Word 2003 was the last good version, before they totally messed up the interface with their "ribbon bar" or whatever they called it, that made its functions impossible to find and use.
Rumor was that Microsoft had two competing teams, and while team A was releasing one version, team B was prepping the next version. Then when team B went to release their version, team A went back to development.
Given the later performance, though I don't know that it still holds. I just know that every time they make changes, I definitely want time to watch others' use of it and see what they are before I accept the upgrade.
" It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation."
Are we supposed to feel sorry that Microsoft can't hit their sales targets? Maybe if they stopped "innovating" their UIs and overall UE, they'd find more eager and rapid corporate adoption.
Every time they "innovate" an interface, there's internal documentation that has to be updated, new training modules have to be made, crosswalks need to be made, memo's (which inevitably nobody reads) have to be written saying: "Oh, you know that button Y that you used to be able to find here to do X? Well, now you have to do A, B, and C before you can click Y to do X. Sorry it'll now take you an extra 5 minutes to do your work."
All that costs money and time, and I definitely don't blame businesses for not wanting to upgrade...
If Microsoft can provide corporations a written guarantee that the updates won't break any of the custom programming those corporations use in their applications and documents, it'll fly. The reason corporate IT doesn't update often is they have all these business-critical things lurking, macros used in spreadsheets, document templates, custom internal applications, that must work, and they need to check that updates don't break those things before they can roll the updates out.
You aren't going to be able to sell business on something, even if the price is lower, if it isn't going to give them anything they aren't already getting and it'll increase the costs associated with the business being down while IT fixes what the latest update broke.
Just because someone else is doing something and they have a popular product does not mean that everything they do is a good idea. Rapid release cycles are a prime example of this as they are extremely antagonistic to enterprise / corporate environments. These environments like something called stability and they are far more interested in a predictable and bug free experience that the latest shiny new thing.
In addition to issues of stability there are also issues of management, when you have a rapid release cycle it is a strain on your IT department as they have to devote a /lot/ more time proportionally to a given product than they otherwise would. Time means money and that means costs and a desire to switch to something that doesn't require constant babysitting.
Time spent by staff learning what changed in /this/ cycle versus the previous one from a few months ago is time that could have been spent on other things. Employees constantly need hand holding on the latest changes and that requires a lot of time. Nobody likes that and it means that the staff that support the product start to resent the product and want it gone.
Attention whore products are ones that irritate everyone and that is a /really/ bad thing if you want your product to stay in that environment. This is an epically stupid idea and one that needs to be relegated the dustbin of history sooner than later.
Last place I worked upgraded from Office 2003 in 2011. And that was mostly because some of our clients were making snarky comments about our ancient software. The absolute last thing a corporation wants is software that is constantly changing. Every minor change throws the oldsters (generally anyone 5 years younger than me and up) into a tizzy because the rote memorization they used to "learn" the old version doesn't work any more.
When necessary, I use OpenOffice - and it's version 1, from 10 years ago. Newer versions changed things up so much I gave up trying to figure them out. Just give me the same fonts, the same menus, the same tabs to click on. In the end it's the content, not the way you type it in, that counts.
The problem with the described model (keeping the same software version for years) is that if at some point you're forced to change, that change will be HUGE. Files become unreadable, and anything that's beyond pushing the mouse will require retraining.
The changes in monthly updates (probably for all software used at a desk) will fit in a medium sized email.
So by sticking to old software, often you're not saving costs, but rather postpone costs. (Assumed there is an automated rollout tool and you don't have to upgrade a few hundered PCs by sneakernet every time a new browser patch comes out)
By the way: the lack of centralized software/update management is one of my windows pet peeves. Even the smalles file compare tool tends to clutter your system with a specialized update agent that tends to pop up in the middle of your WOW raids or whatever else causes maximum grieve for you.
bickerdyke
The summary implies it is accountants that keep IT from upgrading, but last time I checked, accounts don't control IT's budget, IT does. There is only so much money available, if IT decides to use it for development or new hardware instead of upgrading Office or Windows, why blame the accountants? Why blame anybody?
Office used to be called a productivity suite. Since Office 2003, have the end user productivity gains associated with new versions offset the cost to upgrade and retrain? Probably not. Maybe, IT, like the accountants are looking at ROI and finding that there is much more bang for the buck elsewhere in the system than in Office.
Just a thought.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003. It's a utility. There are few features in the newer versions that make doing your job faster, more accurate, or cheaper.
This is planned obsolescence. As such it is a bad model as they always are. But this is no surprise at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
Somehow I fail to see the relation between windows/office sales and holding back innovation.
Quite the opposite. Maybe they should innovate, getting better products, so people will buy those.
morcego
About time! In the rapidly advancing field of spreadsheets and word processing, it's good to know that at least one company is keeping pace with the speed of new ideas by updating their 25+ year old, feature-complete, developmentally mature suite of products every 90 days.
Yeah.
A new tweak to file formats, you will need to have a subscription to be able to have it formatted as the guy who sent it to you wanted. I don't think that Open/Libre Office is the main aim for M$ here, but they are going to be forever playing catchup.
Wow: a great treadmill, corporate IT support will have kittens over this.
That's why I switched to Open Office. I need basic formatting and spell checking, similar for the spread sheets. Microsoft is desperate to stay relevant but 90% of their users have been happy for years so they are running out of reasons to upgrade.
Don't they know IBM is still selling mainframes? Wanna know why? Its not because they are these mythic beasts capable of running your IT needs at 100x the performance (they can't) or because they are an inexpensive solution. IBM continues to sell mainframes because its less expensive for big enterprises to rewrite software they have literally spent tens/hundreds of millions of dollars on since the 1960s. They don't have to rewrite that software because a modern mainframe can pretty much still run the same code, and users trained in the 60's,70's, etc, don't need retraining.
For some reason MS has failed to understand that every time they update their UI, or break some portion of their applications, they upset their core user base which is now business. All the cool trendy people have moved to Apple, the hardcore geeks to linux, the gamers are on ps/xboxes/etc, and the agnostic grandmas are being converted to apple/android devices.
The only remaining user base is the captive one. If MS continues to make it hard to upgrade, either in the form of retraining, or breaking application compatibility (requiring everyone to upgrade their entire software stack), they will soon be written into the dustbin of failed computer companies.
Put your data in our cloud! We've accounted for everything, short of leap year mathematics.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003. It's a utility. There are few features in the newer versions that make doing your job faster, more accurate, or cheaper.
Not where I am contracting as it is a big headache!
One of the VPs read something about the cloud and Office 365 and decided to layoff the Exchange support team and outsource it to Microsoft with outlook.com. Problem is about 500+ users in 4 continents still used Outlook 2003 when the switch went thru.
No email or calandar functions for these users! They need a browser and about 200 called the India help desk at the same time for instructions. +5 hour wait time.
FYI outlook 2003 does not support mapi. Very bad things happened and I am working overtime trying to fix it with angry hostile users with +120 tickets a week as it is with only 2 other guys trying to manage the minimalist insourced I.T.
Staying behind may look cheap and reasonable but tickets and support are skyrocketing and management is all sooo clueless on why is support costs and tickets going up! This software worked fine for 10 years! The social media integration, clouds, and soon HTML 5 versions of SAP, Kronos, Google Docs, Salesforce.com are going to hit those stuck on IE 7 next.
So it is a hassle so lets plug our ears and whine I CANT HEAR YOU. Shit will hit the fine later but in a surge like at this company that decided to go cheap with the accounting department running through 3 different outsources to do I.T. Office 2003 is surely not a utility when we went to the cloud.
http://saveie6.com/
Given that Offfice has (IMHO) been getting worse for several years now, the idea of quarterly updates are less than appealing. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
No business in its collective right mind makes a major capex, on IT or anything else, until the idea is fully analyzed for ROI and risk..
Selling an idea or project to upper management is easy. Getting anything new past the bean-keepers is hard.
Microsoft et al fail when they cannot make a real-numbers business case for upgrade adoption, and Bob's your uncle.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Army to Gates: Halt the free software
I think MS was trying to insinuate their incompatible file formats (2003 vs 98) into the army and therby "force" them to adopt the newer version of Office.
The first sample is free, then you gotta pay. So saith the drug dealer.
Nothing says flounder like a rapid development schedule for a mature product.
Who says there's anything left for Microsoft to do? What if the Office Suite is so near perfect that is impossible to innovate?
And why should anyone in their right (or left) mind accept the argument that customers who don't see sufficient value in upgrading are responsible for holding the Gods of Programming from there annointed purpose of innovation?
This smells like shear desparation driving Microsoft to tactics designed to keep their effort relevant to the news cycle, not a strategy that will spur the development of any kind of thoughtful or meaningful new functionality one might consider innovative. Otherwise we'd be hearing about the improvements and their value to customers.
This is pathetic, both as snooze story and as a business strategy.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003. It's a utility. There are few features in the newer versions that make doing your job faster, more accurate, or cheaper.
Not where I am contracting as it is a big headache!
One of the VPs read something about the cloud and Office 365 and decided to layoff the Exchange support team and outsource it to Microsoft with outlook.com. Problem is about 500+ users in 4 continents still used Outlook 2003 when the switch went thru.
No email or calandar functions for these users! They need a browser and about 200 called the India help desk at the same time for instructions. +5 hour wait time.
FYI outlook 2003 does not support mapi. Very bad things happened and I am working overtime trying to fix it with angry hostile users with +120 tickets a week as it is with only 2 other guys trying to manage the minimalist insourced I.T.
Staying behind may look cheap and reasonable but tickets and support are skyrocketing and management is all sooo clueless on why is support costs and tickets going up! This software worked fine for 10 years! The social media integration, clouds, and soon HTML 5 versions of SAP, Kronos, Google Docs, Salesforce.com are going to hit those stuck on IE 7 next.
So it is a hassle so lets plug our ears and whine I CANT HEAR YOU. Shit will hit the fine later but in a surge like at this company that decided to go cheap with the accounting department running through 3 different outsources to do I.T. Office 2003 is surely not a utility when we went to the cloud.
Sadly, you have completely missed the point. Switching to Office 365 and "the cloud" got you nothing but trouble. And it's not the fault of your "outdated" Office 2003. Once again, someone who is in a position of power, and who doesn't belong there due to their total clulessness, made a gigantic bonehead decision.
Look, office suites are way better than my first essay-writer -- wordstar in ~1986 -- which itself was wonderful. And modern office suites are better than my favourite essay-writer -- wordperfect 5 something I think -- with keyboard function key overlay and alt menu drop downs.
But is there really a difference between office in 2013, and office in 2002? It's been ten years of crazy awesome features that just don't matter.
Sure I use spreadsheets every day. But not for anything that I didn't do in lotus 123. And sure I use write/word every day. Again, not for anything more than I did with wordperfect.
I really couldn't care less any more. I'm not using them to fly to the moon.
The cloud can work great but when you have no I.T. and several outsources who do not communicate with each other do the work shit will happen.
Office 2003 is not cloud ready which was my point. Boneheaded decision for that too as it was not planned. In my opinion in the end upgrading every couple of years and being proactive rather than only put out fires while things raise in costs as it crumbles is cheaper. Office 365 and the cloud works but you can't do new and innovating things on 11 year old platforms.
It is an ugly mess but I get paid. My salary is certainly a cost they could have avoided too. If the cloud offers more cost savings then it is a reason to upgrade. Not say it is boneheaded to keep wasting money on an exchange team.
Methinks you should look at the server side like: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/default.aspx
There is a lot that 2003 doesn't do that the modern versions do. 2003 is more or less on par with LibreOffice.
It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003,
Not half as fraustrating as it the people doing it.. And why is this still happening?
1. Microsoft spent a lot of time pushing tools that made such poor code that it will not work on modern browsers.
2. For years they relied that there was "no alternative" to what they had persuaded professional suit wearers was the only option.
3. Not every version of Windows is worth upgrading to.
And so on. I am sure people here can think of lots of other reasons they have not upgraded to Office 2007 or Vista and are still actually in nice stable dead end of XP and Office 2003. "If it works, don't fix it."
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Trash! I mean Icon.
Bill if they bought Office 365 for the enterprise (E3 / E4) that includes Outlook licenses.
Other than changing the interface and file formats (which don't need to be changed) what needs to be released on a quarterly schedule? It's office software. The majority of people type up memos, simple (as compared to what the software allows) documents, and PowerPoint presentations. Does Excel really need another mathematical function that only a person with a PhD in some obscure branch of mathematics has heard of? The cynic in me says that they will keep changing the file format in order to keep forcing people to upgrade and the subscription service is just to smooth out revenues instead of having very large sales every couple of years.
Microsoft is and continues to be a top notch company. I know the team is truly dedicated to providing the best product out there.
It could be a good move if MS used a stable standard file format, but since they always slightly breake backward compatibility, the more upgrade we get, the more mess we have.
What exactly needs to change every 90 fucking days for a fucking office suite? When Microshit was changing their office suite by the year there were enough issues with backwards compatibility as it was. Every 90 days? What, so they can foist new stupid "interface innovations" their cowboy programmers come up with over the water cooler at an even faster rate?
And yes, I know what Agile micromanagement is. I suffer through it daily. I still fail to see how it would work for the worlds largest monolithic monster of an office suite. Sometimes less change is more.
LibreOffice is free and what more can they really add to office to warrant people shelling out for it every 3 months... Corporations going bankrupt and they wonder why?!?
The folks in Mumbai gave us strict orders not to install it unless they are out of warranty. ... until I had to come in an fix it :-)
If it aint broke dont fix attitude can cause all sorts of unplanned things like this.
Microsoft wants everyone on the planet to pay it every month for the right to use a computer. Who wouldn't, really? Microsoft has proven it cannot be trusted maintaining interoperability with formal or other standards or even previous versions of their own software. Why would you trust that every update to Office 365 will be in your best interest when Microsoft has proven time and again that they'll make major changes just to shift the goal posts on competitors trying to interoperate with them? If a large majority of people get on board with this it will put Microsoft in an incredible position of power to keep them locked in and competitors locked out.
Every company is getting way too fucking greedy, forcing upgrading when it's *really* not necessary (who needs anything since Office 2000?), general computing is going the way of the dodo in favor of Apple-esque walled gardens, every laptop has turned into a glorified VCR with shit-for-keyboards, every awesome technological development is shut down for bullshit legal reasons because paper pushing middleman jackass wouldn't get his cut for doing something useless and obviated by technology...
Remember when tech companies used to do things because they were genuinely useful?
Fuck this whole damn planet, we can't get to Mars soon enough and establish a technocracy ruled by logic, science and reason.
Yeah, OK, that rant was a little off topic, so I'll balance it out by signing off with, fuck you Microsoft with your bullshit greed-based business models.
Libreoffice seems to be more stable that the current MS one.
"It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation."
What can a business do better with the newer versions of Office or Windows that they could not do 10 years ago? Nothing. Most office applications are feature complete. A document cannot be created faster with Win 8 and Office 2013 than with Windows 2000 and Office 2000 given equal hardware (slightly slower actually due to the bloat).
So this is about justifying a subscription based model to get long term revenues on both products. This is not about being rewarded to innovate, but to be paid to do so.
....This Is a Phenomenally Stupid Idea chorus. You want to make Enterprise happy?
1. Release a new version no less every two years, three years even better
2. Backwards compatibility? Yes please, unless there's a good reason otherwise
3. Don't juggle all the menus just to give a few hundred programmers busy work
4. Don't randomly change keyboard shortcuts just for the hell of it. Sure maybe the old ones made no sense. Neither will the new ones, and millions of us have already memorized the old ones.
Sure, we got spoiled by XP's ridiculous longevity, and you still managed to bork Vista. Please, don't saddle yourself and us with arbitrary release targets.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
In word processing, spreadsheet, database, email, etc? There have been very few features since Office 97 I even use. Newer templates and fonts, maybe. The only office product that can seriously expand would be Visio. You can always use more shapes. What else would they add? Rearrange the commands for the 40th time? Add lol to spellcheck? One thing the could reintroduce: scanner support.
Microsoft Office 2013¼
Hopefully they'll go for incremental and benign changes to the UI instead of massive change-for-the-sake-of-change that seems to be hurting all my customers.
Working in IT as a Network Engineer and having that title encompass everything related to a computer, servers, network and desktop that means every 90 days I would be pulling my hair out when something new breaks something. We have copies of Office 2003 along side 2010 so that users can open Access databases because MS fundamentally changed something in the table lookups in 2007. We have XP machines because some of the testing software doesn't work on Windows 7. We have 2000 server because the testing software doesn't support 2003. We have a 2008 server because R2 breaks drivers. We have to deal with the calls when people don't know the difference between the Start button and the start orb. We have to deal with problems when IIS security updates kills our website. So Mr Gates go screw yourself and your 90 day updates. There is a reason why we have software that removes Chrome on a nightly basis because we can't support the function updates and the incompabilities between IE and Chrome website coding.
No, the use of the Microsoft Logo every day. Not all of those posts are about Microsoft.
Every company is getting way too fucking greedy, forcing upgrading when it's *really* not necessary (who needs anything since Office 2000?), general computing is going the way of the dodo in favor of Apple-esque walled gardens, every laptop has turned into a glorified VCR with shit-for-keyboards, every awesome technological development is shut down for bullshit legal reasons because paper pushing middleman jackass wouldn't get his cut for doing something useless and obviated by technology...
Remember when tech companies used to do things because they were genuinely useful?
Fuck this whole damn planet, we can't get to Mars soon enough and establish a technocracy ruled by logic, science and reason.
Yeah, OK, that rant was a little off topic, so I'll balance it out by signing off with, fuck you Microsoft with your bullshit greed-based business models.
I agree with (most of?) your point(s), but that technocracy? Most humans wouldn't be eligible (yeah, I know, that's the point), and the rest would eventually disqualify themselves too, I'm afraid to say.
It'd end up a fairly barren location once everyone was exiled for failing to maintain logic, science, and reason.
*sigh*, this thought about utopia has been brought to you by "human frailty".
Woot! New incompatable file format every 90 days!!! Thanks Microshaft! Fuck me up the ass more often!
I had much less hassle back in the floppy disk era; WordStar and WordPerfect, even Word v5. Took me 10 minutes to format a book. Now I have to spend hours stripping crap out of the files to get clean logically organised text before I can do anything with it.
Since then they've added gigabytes of features, and made it harder and harder to use correctly.
I deal with documents made by a lot of people, smart people, professors, managers, engineers. Not one has ever had a fucking clue how to use any feature beyond directly selecting text and formatting it. No one knows how to use styles, because MS made that once vital feature so user-friendly that it will fuck up your entire document by trying to anticipate what you want and hiding the options to control them.
I've just spent half a day cleaning up a book document. The writer had lots of block text quotes. She made them by tabbing in each line individually and putting a hard line break at the end of each line. I spent an hour converting those to actual Block Text styles. Then all the italics were for some idiotic reason (not her fault) styled as "Times Roman Italic" font, not "Times Roman" with italic style, which is what they should have been . That took another hour to fix. All headings were directly formatted, so they had to be made into heading styles. And so on.
All because MS concentrates on flashy crap like "Ribbons" and embedded video and moves all the important structural stuff out of sight in case it scares the users. It would be great if it actually worked and produced better documents more easily at the end of the day, but it demonstrably doesn't. People spend much more time and make much uglier documents now than they did at any time since wordprocessing was invented.
So now, a new version of Word every 90 days. Oh joy.
Maybe I should just tell authors to print their documents out and pay someone to retype it.
Old people are going to be migrating out of the business world though. People are used to there phones updating there software every week. I'm sorry, but the "oldsters" are not going to be in business forever, and the ones that do probably can afford a younger one do the work for them. That and "oldsters" at my work slow work down.
MSFT's net income for 2012 is 26.6% lower than it was in 2011. Subscription Office is about 1 thing, bringing the income numbers back up.
Office 2010's home and student edition was $140, which licensed 3 PCs, and gave you the latest version for about 3 years. That works out to $46/year assuming you upgrade (which you don't have to do). Now they want $100/year with forced upgrades. This is for software that does the same thing it did 3 years ago.
I am a technical contributor for a large corporation. I don't program, unless you count MATLAB/Octave/Scilab as programming. Over the years, I have come to avoid spreadsheets and word processors in favor of simple Latex editors and Octave. It's not because I like them, or I like the command line, or that I like the control they give me. I find that they are a pain really. So why do I do it? Why?
Word still stinks, and Excel is no good beyond making a 2-d graph of one variable versus another. Sure, they can do more. The problem is, I don't sit at my desk all day. I go to the lab and try things out. Sometimes, I don't revisit an analysis for 6 months, or even 5 years. After a year or so, a complex spreadsheet is no good, if you can't remember the details. Octave code is much easier to go back and figure out what I did, and MUCH easier to comment.
Don't get me started on Word. It still cannot handle figures, graphics, and equations in a simple, consistent and bug-free manner. I don't feel a thrill using latex, and it has enough of its own problems. The thing is, once I solve a problem in Latex, it stays solved. Not so with Word. Enough said.
Here is the issue. Document generation has largely been solved, and really all that is needed are bug fixes and refinements. This is not profitable enough. This is not my problem, but it is a problem for Microsoft. They don't care about me, they care about their profit.
The "cloud" is not here. plugs ears. La La La.
hope you don't mind the reboots...
Great...now I have to teach my mom their latest UI abomination 4 times a year!! It's Skype all over again :(
They have a problem that most companies would wish to have: Their product is done. It's done. It has every key feature that is even halfway needed by the user, it can do pretty much aside of making a decent cuppa java. Changes are no longer something the user is looking forward to, rather, it seems that they're dreaded and outright feared because they'd have to relearn something without actually getting anything out of it because, as said before, what they WANT to do CAN already be done with the product they have.
This is, of course, a problem for MS. No need to upgrade means no need to buy something, which means no money for them. I can well see why they want me to switch to an abo model. I just have no idea why the heck I should.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
not bloody likely. word 2003 is all right, but frankly, since word 5.1 added hyperlink support, i haven't needed an updated version except when required to get it to work on a new OS.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
What about the features ? ;)
And about how long will take them, between Office file format changes that render them incompatible with previous versions? That's the most exciting feature of Office updates, and all customers look forward to these special moments. That's the thing that should happen every quarter to keep people involved in Office and shouting: For Innovation!
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Just because MS is putting out updates DOES NOT imply, nor should you infer that MS has moved to agile development methods. This is a lame leap by /. crappers again.
It will keep secretaries busy having to constantly update all files from previous versions to maintain compatibility.
It will increase the job market for trainers who have to train the personnel - after all, they will be going back to school every 90 days to learn the latest new "modern" UI...
It will keep doctors busy diagnosing the RSI of the employees...
It will keep physical therapists busy servicing the employees...
It will keep archives busy doing expansion to preserve the multiple files of the "improved" format...
It will create more jobs for programmers having to update all the layered applications for the business..
It will keep ISPs happy selling more network bandwidth...
It will keep MS profitable...
With all of these "improvements" it doesn't matter if the customer goes out of business trying to PAY for all this... or because MS "forgets" to update a certificate... or if the ISP fails due to network load...
Thing is, a quarter might just not be enough to discover all flaws and holes in the current release, before the next one comes along, fixing some and introducing new ones, which we again won't have time to fix. And the problem is, malware authors are faster than any release or fix you can come up with, so while a frequent release cycle might decrease official 0day vulnerability lists, which might be a good PR-point, I'm not sure it will help anyone in the long run. Also, if we have a short release cycle, who thinks MS will spend any time and recources on fixing a release being 4-5-6 cycles old? It's not that I don't trust MS releasing non-flawed sw, but I don't, and I don't know anyone who does, righfully so.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
No it isn't planned obsolescence. Microsoft needs to start moving changes through their ecosystem much faster.
You are right.
Microsoft wants to force incompatibilty so that businesses who want to 'play well' with others will keep buying MS Office. So its worse than planned obsolscence.
What are you expect of "innovation" in a word processor?
Word processors were pretty much feature complete 20 years ego.
Just look at Latex, the basic functions were finalized in 1978.
The only "innovation" is new and unnecessary changes in the user interface and new document formats.
With Odf we should have now an international format for documents and Pdf for exchange of finished documents.
Except the new document formats like Odf and OOXML, why should anyone buy in a 90 days release cycle of a Word Processor?
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Total Commits 1:
-String version = "16.3.4"
+String version = "17.0.0"
Message to users:
"Microsoft is pleased to announce a new version of Office (available at no charge), with many new features"
Isn't "holds back innovation" the whole idea of freezing on an old version? Voting against UI changes like the new ribbon, and the one-copy-per-computer just announced. The less of this innovation the better.
Every 90's you get a new letter I guess. Otherwise I can't see the need to add 'features' to a spreadsheet every 90 days, particularly if you're in a corporate setting where not everyone will upgrade at the same time.
When the world marches ahead while you stay behind you build technical debt. The further you fall behind the more effort it will take to catch up.
To put it another way, businesses (and individuals!) that can't stay current will become history. It's just a matter of time.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
The problem with agile is that it leads to locally optimal solutions and punishes large change and significant systems infrastructure investments.
It is a suboptimal methodology if you care about the opportunity cost to global complexity and progress.
I think MS is wasting everyones time to be constantly reinventing the wheel with essentially the same or worse outcomes as before in some categories it would actually be refreshing for once if they just sat down and made the existing shit they have work better rather than constantly rewriting the wheel.
As for IT upgrades XP and Office 2003 are good enough for tons of users even if they upgraded and loved the new versions what difference in productivity/bottom line does a new version of word or windows really make? All of the important problems in the space have already been addressed. Thinking you can strongarm people into constantly re-buying or renting all of their software is a battle you will loose.
You either incrementally improve your systems or work on huge disruptive change with huge payouts. You don't ever introduce disruptive change with only incremental or arguably negative improvements if you expect to continue to stay relevant.
I'd call it "enhancement *then* marketing".
I'm no Apple fanboy, and for desktop I'm still on Win XP. But for a phone, my last comparison was an HTC Win Mobile 6 slide phone, which I hated because ... it didn't work like desktop windows. But I couldn't get it to do anything truly useful either.
What Apple did was put rubber bumpers on the smartphone, chop off a lot of the power-user type finesses I for one am used to on the desktop, (and even I'm only "medium"), and then *polish* the blue blazes out of what was left. That lack of polish was the fatal weak spot in existing mobile. So I decided to take a long look back at the smartphone landscape and try to continue my style of "pick once and pick well". It did mean I had to sit out the first couple of years when the hype was in swing. Then I settled on the 3GS with the 32Gig storage model and I have been "satisfied" ever since. I still only do about 20 little things on it, and I have serious doubts about the quality of iPhone apps as an ecosystem, but what it did, it did well.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So the warez developers will have to embrace agile too?
It sounds like they are losing touch with their core customers: The enterprise. ( or they want to, after looking at the billions Apple makes from 'general consumers'. ) The enterprise wants stability, not a moving target. This is why there is still a large XP user-base out there. it works, they have the infrastructure setup to support it. Change is *expensive*.
The general consumer wants shiny objects coming all the time so they don't get bored.. So i wonder where Microsoft is really headed now. And who will fill the vacuum created if they do leave the enterprise market.
All of the comments here decrying the "Oh noes, MS upgrade BAD!" are the same fanbois and mouthbreathers I see lauding "agile development" and "streamlining the enterprise" for pro-Linux/pro-short-cycle development and deployment approaches. For the Fortune 500, software deployment is slow, painful, and takes MONTHS of regression testing and upgrade/interoperability testing. That's why stuff takes SO LONG to move off of in the real word. I personally love being on the bleeding edge of most things, but many departments due to Oracle integrations, custom VBAs, API hooks, reporting exports/imports, massive Excel spreadsheets, SQL reporting, etc., etc. are the reason we can't go to the latest and greatest. Forcing frequent and potentially damaging upgrades is not in Microsoft's best interest. If you read the RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot), you'll see they're talking basically automatic point releases - NOT major revision drops. I'm OK with that - if something is broken/incomplete/incompatible, streaming the update after being vetted isn't *ALL* bad. What I do fear is the inability to opt-out of forced upgrades. Some of my environments are "point-in-time" locations that cannot be changed without MAJOR planning and testing. If I can put my developers and IT staff on new versions, the pilot group, non-integrated staff, and the early-adopters group on this, and then do some testing for the static groups ... it's not a bad thing.
When I hear these arguments they always seem to be coming from the point of view of IT, and IT's point of view hasn't changed in 20 years.
It is not however, aligned with the business's point of view. What. So. Ever.
The business world has been changing, faster and faster, and constantly is looking for an edge over its competitors. Increasingly business is viewing this "Cant' Do!" attitude from their IT departments as liabilities rather then engines. It's why IT is considered overhead, not investment.
Until recently we had folks still on IE6 at our company, because of this Can't Do attitude from our IT drones. When I meet with a VP and have to tell them they could have feature X in two weeks if we weren't still stuck with IE6, but since we are it either can't be done or will take 3 months (long after feature X has lost its time-sensitive relevance). They aren't blaming me...rather they're looking for blood from the inept IT department. From the VP's point of view he knows he can just click the Update button and boom, done. So what the hell is he paying the IT department so much for if it's taking them literally YEARS to perform the same 2 SECOND task?!
Yes, yes, I know. There's a world of difference between updating 1 computer and updating 1,000. You know what? Bullshit. There is only a difference because you suck balls at your job. Seriously, go learn PowerShell, go learn something. Because frankly any "Senior IT Professional" that has a harder time updating 1,000 machines then a non-technical user has updating their own machine, simply isn't an Senior IT Professional. Hell, I expect higher proficiency from unpaid IT interns.
Get off your fat IT asses and learn to empower your company's business visions, or become irrelevant and replaced. Decide quickly, because no one is going to wait around for you.
My
"What if the Office Suite is so near perfect that is impossible to innovate?"
To be honest, for the average home/small company user there is to much crap going on. Why not just produce a bog standard word processor and spreadsheet application without all the 1000's of bells and whistles? I doubt 99.9999999% of people use 99.99% of the crap included in some of the stuff.
Back port to a simple, fast thing that just gets the job done in a few seconds.
Wait, can anyone tell me WHY anyone would want to get new features and upgrade word processing software?
What possible new features could there be to make it worth paying for software on a monthly basis, unless its in its current form broken or unusuable?
If its broken and unusable, it should be fixed for free, since you have already paid for it once. I cant think for the life of me what i would need a new version of office for.
Hell I was still using office 2003 until 3 years ago.
The only reason to upgrade would be due to planned obsolescence..
oh MICROSOFT.
Sorry. Dunno what i was thinking.
This is a company that replaces a start menu with something that's not a start menu because.. well i dunno honestly.
Did ANYONE say "I wish the start menu was the size of my entire screen, and as a bonus, open all of my apps in huge fonts and large formats for a touch screen and thus not actually be a start menu at all."
I have been using windows since 3.11.
I remember in the days when you could change your background colour in an explorer window. Try doing that now.
It seems microsoft has been innovating by making the software harder to customize to your needs, harder to use, and thus..
oh of course.
MICROSOFT
I keep getting away from myself here.
Microsoft needs to listen to its customers for once. I own a small business, and to me, customers are PURE GOLD.
It'll cost more in software over time, it'll cost more in lost productivity due to compatibility issues, it'll cost more in IT salaries for having to hire people just to constantly deal with ever changing versions of Office and trying to keep all the various offices at the same version. Sounds almost completely impossible to me. Would never work here.
So MS puts out software with a slew of vulnerabilities and to get the fixes I need a subscription? Imagine teaching someone to use software that updates UI every 90 days!
It is a good thing there are alternatives out there.