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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Office Freedom Beginning to Bite

Interesting how news items juxtapose. Comments like those from Volker Weber and Todd Bishop raise questions about why anyone should bother with Microsoft Office 2003 (especially as very little has changed in anything except Outlook, and what has changed seems to predicate purchase of proprietary middleware) if they have something already that's good enough for them (we've not upgraded from Office 95 on the one PC we have still running Windows 98 - the rest are running OpenOffice.org). Volker says:

But I still don't see any good reason to upgrade my production system from Office 2000, which was the last version that did not force you to activate through registration. ... Office 2003 does not add new features to Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Instead Microsoft is pushing software development on top of the "Office System". Tightly integrated with backend systems like Sharepoint or Exchange, these applications will be raising the bar for competitors in the collaboration space. There is a big IF in this plan. Customer will have to upgrade their infrastructure with the latest MS server technologies to enable these applications.

and despite a positive start Todd quickly reflects voices of doubt (even from among the faithful):

Office is largely competing with its former self. "Office XP and Office 2000 are solid products -- they didn't have significant problems. The end result is that this product as a fix for those products just won't be as compelling," Enderle said. "You have to want the collaborative capability that exists in it before you're going to get too excited about it."

"We're going to be upgrading primarily because we have the right to do that, and we're looking to justify why we spent all that money (on the licensing program) a year and a half ago," Cotes said.

And I'm seeing articles everywhere saying "it's not worth the upgrade".

Meanwhile, the European Commission's IDA office has just published its 'Open Source Migration Guidelines' to help EU bodies wanting to move off Windows select and deploy the open source solutions they need. They've also built a spreadsheet to help calculate the cost savings of such a move (in terms of an estimated time to recoupe the cost of migration). I'm not sure I'd agree with their assumption that the cost of acquiring open source software will always be zero, but the revolution in pricing that's being driven by open source will mean that, even with non-zero pricing, it is a compelling proposition. Maybe, like the City of Munich, people are starting to be ready to pay for freedom above features?

posted at 9:35 PM (UK) | |