jawfish

Microsoft Office, a Prisoner of Success?
john posted in technologies on October 25th, 2005

Around October 10th, Microsoft announced a Whole New Interface for its flagship product, Office.

from the MS site:

The biggest application in desktop computing is MS Office. It dominates the Mac and the PC market, so much so that many other applications copy its user interface. They do so because users are much happier with a familiar interface, even when it’s clumsy.

The redoubtable Jakob Neilsen reports that Microsoft is changing the interface in Office. No more deep menus, instead there will be something called a “results-oriented user interface”. On the website it looks like docked panels with new names. Look to your favorite reviewers for in-depth appraisals. The usability group at Microsoft has no doubt tested it thoroughly, but they have three large obstacles to overcome: existing feature-bloat, entrenched users, cost.

I can’t tell if this Microsoft interface is better. It may well be. Certainly it will be hyped. Remembering a PhD candidate who wrote his entire thesis in Word, but hand-formatted each footnote instead of using the automatic footnotes, I have my doubts. Since writing my first technical manual in Word, I have been a dedicated user of styles and templates, but I find it impossible to convince users who write shorter pieces.

The very long list of features in Word, itself creates an intimidating climate where users won’t experiment. In the first place, Microsoft is famous for unfixed bugs, and secondly, the interface is often confusing in the tabs and sub-menus. Every Word user has experienced the frustration of multiple unclear options and given up on the fancy way, to go back to highlight-and-format. Plus, once the interface for a particular feature is mastered, users have a resistance to change. The more complex the interface, the greater the inertia.

There are alternatives to Office, however. The much-talked about Open Software movement is maturing, and one of the best products is OpenOffice, a clone of Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is free and runs on Windows, as well as many other platforms. OpenOffice uses the MS Office interface and feature-set as its standard.

The licensing for Microsoft Office has changed since the 90′s, so you can’t copy it any more, because it calls home over the Internet to verify your license. All those users who want to work at home or give their kids a copy of Office, will have to pay for their own copies. Nowadays, that means as much money as a cheap PC costs. On cost alone, the WordPerfect suite that’s pre-installed on many PCs, and the free OpenOffice that I now use are likely to pick up a lot of users.

Now, Microsoft won’t lose any revenue from lost users who weren’t paying before, but they will lose market share. With government and corporate cost-cutting, free applications like OOo (OpenOffice) are bound to start percolating through the desktop market. The coming push for the Open Document spec will drive organizations to OpenOffice, too. OOo uses OpenDocument as its default format. If you reflect that the largest corporations are multinational, with numerous, competing local requirements to meet, then the push for the Open Document standard will seem inevitable in the corporate world too.

On the other hand, if Microsoft doesn’t improve the interface, they’ll lose customers to free applications because the switch is easy and free. They’ll lose or postpone corporate sales because there’s less reason for the customer to upgrade. Worse, free applications might actually fix the interface, without confusing power users, and become more attractive. Though to be sure, visionary design is not the strong suit in Open Software. It’s more likely that the OpenOffice folks will just copy Microsoft again.

Microsoft defeated the very popular Word Perfect and Lotus 123 and a slew of other apps to become dominant. Now, without any commercial competitor, Microsoft competes with itself. At the top of the hill, every way is down. They are stuck with their own success.

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More reading:

The issue of open documents and MS Office

OpenDocument and Massachusetts A sensible and thorough essay on the open document issue.
A very long paper on Open Source software standards and universal implementation by the same author.
Wikipedia on Open Document – good for a quick explanation.
Another long explanation of OpenDocument and the search by the EU for a competitive open standard.
Microsoft’s page.