Why Microsoft Office is in Trouble; Debunking Microsoft "Goodwill"

more or less I'd agree... most of the MS hate is reflexive, reductive, drivel. But MS has rightly lost some good will for pushing Vista on the windows community which from my personal experience is an extremely bad OS. Furthermore, the newest renditions of Office are equally pretty bad both in the "new and improved" interface which most people who have been using office products for years can't make heads or tails of... and their defaulting to a new standard which flooded the document pool with 'incompatibility' warnings.

MS Office is a good suite and I suspect they'll probably either go back to the old interface at some point or at least offer it as an option. That said, there is a lot to be said for an open document standard. If all the documents are in some proprietary system that you need MS Office (absolute newest) to use then that's a problem for document exchanges. What we need is a more gradual transition from one format to another with full disclosure and inter-compatibility.

I understand MS's profit motive to monopolize the standards and applaud their spirit to a certain extent. But I think the document environment has evolved enough to establish it's own standards instead of being dictated to by the most influential provider in the business.

Comments (2)

- BanMaster
Blah blah blah MS is evil, blah blah blah, standards are bad, blah blah blah, I have a small penis, blah blah blah, NOTHING is better than free unsupported software, blah blah blah, no company should be allowed to make money from their own IP, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

I think that about sums it up right?
- (0 Kudos received)
- Karmashock
more or less I'd agree... most of the MS hate is reflexive, reductive, drivel. But MS has rightly lost some good will for pushing Vista on the windows community which from my personal experience is an extremely bad OS. Furthermore, the newest renditions of Office are equally pretty bad both in the "new and improved" interface which most people who have been using office products for years can't make heads or tails of... and their defaulting to a new standard which flooded the document pool with 'incompatibility' warnings.

MS Office is a good suite and I suspect they'll probably either go back to the old interface at some point or at least offer it as an option. That said, there is a lot to be said for an open document standard. If all the documents are in some proprietary system that you need MS Office (absolute newest) to use then that's a problem for document exchanges. What we need is a more gradual transition from one format to another with full disclosure and inter-compatibility.

I understand MS's profit motive to monopolize the standards and applaud their spirit to a certain extent. But I think the document environment has evolved enough to establish it's own standards instead of being dictated to by the most influential provider in the business.
- (0 Kudos received)