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June 23, 1999
Is Microsoft Office 2000 a "Go" or a "Whoa?"| Threads |
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Is your company ready to make the move to Office 2000, or will you be sticking with the suites you have? Is the year 2000 a factor in your deployment decisions? If you're moving to Office 2000, what features tipped the balance for you? If you're not switching, what convinced you to stick with what you have? Have we reached an era of diminishing returns on office suites? Join in. Discuss it in LangaLetter threads. |
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| Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com. |
Microsoft's Office 2000 is out to generally positive reviews: Various third-party head-to-head comparisons rate it higher than Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 and Lotus SmartSuite 9.1/FastSite 2.0 in almost all areas. It especially shines in its Web and collaboration features.
But it's offered in a dizzying and expensive range of bundles and options with prices ranging from about $190 for the smallest upgrade version to almost $1,000 for a full, nonupgrade version of the most complete (and complex) developer's edition.
That's obstacle No. 1: I think these prices are way too high in the context of today's hardware costs. After all, you can get a bare-bones PC for $200 and a fairly decent machine for $1,000. It's hard to see why a couple of CDs and some documentation should cost as much as an entire PC. But they do, and that means upgrading even a small office will be expensive, and upgrading an enterprise could be astronomically costly.
Office 2000 is also a disk hog, with normal installations occupying anywhere from 167 Mbytes to an incredible 656 Mbytes (for the developer's version). That's obstacle No. 2: Hard-drive space is cheap, but it's not free, and these disk-space requirements will be enough to push some systems over the edge and necessitate a hardware upgrade. This adds to the costs and complexity of an upgrade.
(There's a wonderful irony that last week's LangaLetter was about NewDeal Office--an operating environment and office suite that fits in 10 Mbytes of drive space, needs only 640 Kbytes of RAM, and costs $35 a seat!)
Then there's obstacle No. 3: The timing. We're at the halfway mark for 1999 and about to start the downhill run to Dec. 31: Even if a company has its year 2000 testing well in hand, who will want to add a huge new project--and a huge new year 2000 variable--into their enterprise software mix at this late date?
Obstacle No. 4 can be summed up in two words: Why bother? There's no huge, glaring problem or inadequacy with existing office suites. More than 100 million copies of Microsoft Office 97 are in use, and that suite has been well-patched, debugged, and burned-in by now. Tens of millions of other users run Corel, Lotus, or other suites to good effect. All these existing, already-installed suites work well, and people know how to use them. What's the compelling reason to switch?
All of which makes me wonder if Microsoft is way off base on this release. It's expensive. It's fat. It's late enough so that it's bumping into the year 2000 danger zone. And its new features are layered on top of an existing feature set that's so vast most users only scratch the surface; most find Office 97/Corel/Lotus features more than adequate.
It sounds paradoxical: I can easily believe that Office 2000 may be the best, most complete, feature-rich suite ever. But I also can easily believe that most business and users, instead of saying "Wow!" may simply say "So what?"
What's your take? Are you or your company ready to make the move to Office 2000, or will you be sticking with the tried, true, and paid-for suites you have? Is the year 2000 a factor in your deployment decisions? If you're moving to Office 2000, what features tipped the balance for you? If you're not switching, what convinced you to stick with what you have? Could Microsoft have altered your position with different timing, pricing, or features?
And: Have we reached an era of diminishing returns on office suites? Join in!
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