A “lightweight” Web-based Office makes perfect sense
So Sam Diaz over at ZD Net takes Microsoft to task, because they have said that their online offerrings of Office will be “lightweight”. And then he says (in a nutshell), “what’s Microsoft’s problem, Google has gotten this right already!” The reality is, Google Apps are “lightweight” too. As Steve Ballmer mentioned, they didn’t even have footnotes (they got footnotes a few days after he mentioned it).
I can understand that Microsoft is lagging on getting a version of Office on the Web. But, let’s examine reality. Google Apps’ usage rates show that there is not much demand for Web-base office suites at this time, Office still makes a ton of money, and offering a “lightweight” Web Office still puts them on par with Google. Most importantly, the people who are attracted to a Web based office suite neither want nor need a “kitchen sink” application; if they did, they would just buy a copy of Microsoft Office or download Open Office.
The people who are not buying Office are the casual users. People who need to type up a shopping list every now and then, or maybe use a spreadsheet to balance their checkbooks. Yes, this is a huge percentage or users, probably the bulk of home users. These are the same people who do not need the tight collaboration of Outlook, and for whom Web-mail is perfectly suitable. And so on and so on. I am sure that there is some money that can be made, selling ads on these online applications. Unlike most online apps, an office suite is insanely “sticky”, with users spending many hours in them.
What is lost in the whole thing, is a misunderstanding of why people pay for Office in the first place. Businesses buy Office because of Microsoft Exchange. Period. End of story. If you are not using Exchange, all of a sudden, Outlook is merely an “adequate” email client, an “adequate” calandering application, and an “inadequate” contact management system. Word is a great “kitchen sink” word processor, but in reality, the alternatives (Corel WordPerfect, OpenOffice) are perfectly acceptable from probably 90% (or more) of users. Ditto for Excel.
In fact, Office’s “killer app” as far as I am concerned on OneNote (if you have not used it, I highly recommend it!). Over the last year, I have been training myself to transition from paper to OneNote; for every activity that I do this with, I am happy, but it is taking me some time. As an example of just how good OneNote is, I used to buy a paper notebook (usually steno pads with perforated sheets) every few months. Now, I buy one every 6 – 9 months. Even more telling, when I print something from OneNote, once I am done with it, I save the paper. Either I flip it over to used as scratch paper (for those tasks that I am not using OneNote for yet), or I print more items from OneNote on the other side of it. Off hand, I would love to have a Windows Mobile device, provided that it had a copy of OneNote that would automaticall sync with what I have on my desktop PC. That would blow my mind in terms of usefulness and functionality.
So other than OneNote, I really do not think that Office is particularly great. Overall, it suffers from having too many features and too wide of a user base. It just cannot make everyone happy, so no one is particularly happy with it. For the casual user, it is far too complex, even with the Ribbon. For the “power user”, too many tasks require too many clicks or keystrokes (for the power user, WordPerfect 5.1 was the best application on the face of the planet, except for possibly Emacs). So yes, I really do think that if Microsoft’s online Office is “lightweight”, not only is this not terribly bad, but I think that it is really good. Remember Microsoft Works? Where it was a disaster, was that it used a file format that wasn’t Office’s file formats. But as a lightweight office suite aimed at casual users, it was good. If Office Online replicates that, there is nothing bad about it at all.
J.Ja
Word 2007 works well enough that I prefer it over anything else. Excel 2007 is definitely useful to me with the newer features. PowerPoint 2007 is alright but I’m angry that I can’t record narrations with MP3 audio format. I have to use uncompressed audio making the files too large to distribute even when using inferior sampling rates and bit depths. Access is way better than anything in Open Office and it’s still the perfect front end for an ODBC database and infinitely better than any web interface.
What people actually want is a rich client that is small enough to be downloaded on the fly with in-the-cloud and offline access. That is the Holy Grail to me.
It’s funny, the 2007 edition is really good, but most people hate it because it is so different… yet, it is the differences that make it "good". The people who can’t stand the idea of Word or Excel changes are the people who use it for 5 minutes a week, and it took them 10 years to finally figure out where the 4 features they use are, and now it will take them another 10 years to re-find them. I’m not an Office "power user", but I am a "heavy user" (I don’t do much, but I do it often). It took me a few days to readjust. I suspect that most true "power users" resent the time it took them to relearn, but are pretty happy with the results.
Access does have its uses, and I would be happy if more people used Access and less people used Excel.
Overall though, while I do agree 100% that Microsoft Office is the best game in town, I don’t think that it hits the "outstanding" mark in all categories. PowerPoint and Outlook are good examples of that. Indeed, I’ve always considered Excel to be the best Office app by far, but that could be bias based on my experience. I’m grateful that FrontPage is dead, and I think that Publisher should probably face that fate as well (that may be influenced by the fact that by definition, anyone using Publisher is an amatuer, so I’ve seen nothing good come out of that application).
But even with the "best game in town" suite, even most "heavy users" only use a small (and common) subset of Office’s features. A "lightweight" version of it would do very well, I suspect! If there was a way for me to use an ad-supported, online Word, that allowed me to store my files locally and keep my data out of "the cloud" I would be tempted (only tempted) to use it. If I had to pay for Office out of my own pocket, it would be a no-brainer!
J.Ja
FrontPage is not dead, just renamed and put in the Expression class of products. Also, I’m a fan of FrontPage 2003 for HTML editing. Never been a fan of Publisher though.
Expression Web is a fresh product; from what I can tell, it is derived from the Visual Studio code base, not the FrontPage code base. What I like about it is that it is very friendly to people who want to be "hands on" with the HTML, which a lot of WYSIWYG HTML editors are not. Overall, I think that it is a great product, and it produces code much cleaner than FrontPage typically did. I never worked with FP 2003, but previous versions were really bad with the code quality.
J.Ja
FP before 2003 was nasty. FP 2003 was a fine product and Expression Web looks pretty decent.