For the last couple of weeks I have been playing with MS-Office 2007. Vista has gotten all the big news, but M$ rolled out this new version at the same time as Vista. It seems very much like when M$ released Office 95 to coincide with the release of Windows 95 which was the last huge windows release.
I had not been that interested in the new release, because of what I had read and seen from the betas that M$ was focusing much more on tying the user ever deeper into their product stack, rather than providing new functionality. In some ways it sounded like they were finally going to do something that would alienate their user base. So here I am a couple of weeks into playing with this and most of my worst fears have been realized.
Microsoft has made the biggest user interface redesign since they released Word 2.0 (after the glop that was Word 1.x). They have completely abandoned their traditional menu/toolbar design for this new thing called the ribbon. M$ claims that they came up with this after extensive usability testing and user feedback. Once again, I really wonder who are these users that M$ gets for their usability testing? Did they specifically go looking for people who have no clue how to use Office and plunk them down in front of a computer? Did they even think what effect this new interface would have on their established user base? NOTHING is where it used to be, and while some stuff has become slightly easier to find, just as many of the advanced features are now even more obscured.
I have been teaching people how to used M$ Office products since before M$ bundled them together and called them Office. This radical departure is going to cost M$ big time. Why? Most office workers these days have been using Office for years. They may not know where to find all the features, but they have, through time, effort, and training, managed to get to a point where they can mostly get their work done without having to stop and focus on the software. Now, with this whole new interface, they will have to waste time figuring out how to do stuff they already knew how to do! It's like someone coming in and taking your house and rearranging the floor plan into a more "efficient" design. You get no new space, maybe a few newer appliances, but every time you get out of bed to go to the bathroom you smack into a wall. Or put another way, it is like having someone else clean and organize your desk for you. Everything is neat, but you can't find anything without spending ten minutes rooting around.
There are some new features in the 2007 version, but most of them rely on people adopting other M$ technologies, especially their Share Point Server. In larger businesses that run pure M$ shops this will be a real benefit, but more and more businesses are going for a more hetrogenous environment. For small businesses and individual users there are a few minor improvements and tweaks, along the lines of last two releases of Office, but nothing major or earth-shattering. The products that make up Office are all fairly mature, so this is no surprise. I can find little to justify the pain that all users at all levels are going to experience when they upgrade. All businesses are going to take a productivity hit when, and if, they upgrade.
To me, Microsoft may have done themselves in with this new interface design. This version is the first real chance for a product like OpenOffice (or Google Office tools) to really take off. Since users are going to need retraining in order to master this new version, why not just switch to a different product that will actually feel more familiar to current office users than 2007 will. Oh yeah, it will also cost lot less. The prices for Office are extremely high for such widely deployed software.
I spent a goodly number of years teaching classes for people who were transitioning from WordPerfect to Word. There was a lot of anger and resentment in those forced to switch. It wasn't so much that they loved WP, it was that they had spent the time and knew how to use it to get their job done. Now they were being asked to use a new program with no real benefit. Word could do 95% of what WP did, but it did it in a different way and was stored in different menus. It is really hard to convince someone who has put in the time to learn a product to give up that product for a competing one, unless there are huge benefits. This upgrade is going be that sort of situation. Office 2007 is not a different product, but switching to it is going to feel very much like moving to a new product and I haven't really found and killer features that make it worth the pain.
Microsoft had better hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
