Is it me or does any one else think Bill has (again) taken the opening voiceover from the Outer Limits too much to heart?
“There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousands channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.”
Office 12 changes – The “Ribbon.” With one fell swoop, this all-encompassing UI conceit mostly replaces drop-down menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and task panes as we know them. The Ribbon is an oversized area at the top of the screen that holds formatting tools for an array of Office options. It’s broken down into multiple panels, and the tools change both at your command and in context as you work with different elements in a document.
One of the first questions out of my mouth at our demo was, “Is there a ‘Go Back to the Old Office look and feel’ mode?” The answer is…no, absolutely not. Microsoft’s so confident in this new approach that it’ll be the only interface option in Office 12.
I think confidence is not the only reason. Could it be Bill is feeling the heat himself?
When Office 12 ships, OpenOffice.org will suddenly sport the “old” interface. The same holds true for WordPerfect, which has lately been following a “We’re a lot like Microsoft Office, only more affordable” strategy. That’s not necessarily a knock on those products–actually, it might turn out to be a major point in their favor, since they’ll presumably still sport the look and feel which the world is familiar with, while Office 12 will be an unknown quantity. But at the very least, the question “From a typical user’s standpoint, how are Microsoft Office and cheaper alternatives different?” will have a number of strikingly clear new answers.
Maybe this will turn out to be a good design feature, but the lack of backward compatibility is simply arrogant.
Well John, it’s just too bad Apple didn’t bring out this sort of innovation first. That way pundits could fawn all over lauding the courage it takes to make this sort of shift.
Microsoft can’t win; it makes a change and its arrogant. Apple rips off Knofabulator (a toy for Pete’s sake — though really not dissimilar from MS’s earlier Active Desktop) and they’re heros.
I have to agree with you on this one. I’ve made a living using Microsoft products to develop programs that run on Microsoft server Products that serve users using Microsoft Windows for years but I think that Microsoft has reached the point of maximum density on this one. Honestly…their proucts, especially the higher end server software and integration programs such as BizTalk Server have functionality that’s hard to match even though setup of some of this stuff takes more than a little time, knowledge and cursing, but on a consumer level, I would be a lot more likely to give Open Office a shot than fork over several hundred dollars for a software package that causes me to change the way I’m comfotable with working. I think that, as a developer, I’ll be using visual studio, SQL…etc. for many years to come, but as a consumer I see a brick wall in Microsoft’s future if someone doesn’t turn the wheel.
Will ANYBODY’S existing macros be compatible with the new ribbon? Macros tend to use menu commands.
Having seen the office 12 stuff at PDC, I have two comments
1. The new toolbar presentation should allow the feature bloat to continue for years. Does more than 1% of the population require more than the ability to change fonts, make things bold and indent paragraphs? And does anybody really need yet another pane in outlook?
2. The real problem with office is that all new features deal with style and none deal with substance. Morons – that would be The Boss, but not at my company, fortunately – spend their time crafting beautiful, vacuous presentations. I would compare the new features to what happened with the web – the more animated gifs and blinking text one found on the page in its early days (or, currently, the more flash), the less substantial the page.
No matter what you add to office, a moron will continue to be a moron. When they make the demoronizing version of office, I will be sure to buy it.
Wow, those screenshots look REALLY cluttered and confusing. Merely because Apple loves HUGE icons doesn’t mean the rest of the world should follow suit. Maybe this will kill off Office.
And one last thing. The main argument against using Office alternatives is the cost of training to get workers productive using the alternative product. Here we have Microsoft GUARANTEEING the need for training as the interface is completely different. When faced with that training costs, how many corporations and governments will bother with the training and simply keep prior Office versions or make a switch to a different office suite with a more “normal” interface.
A big “Who cares?” to Microsoft and it’s new MS Office. For several versions it has just been one obscure feature and improvement after another, with little change of substance. The occasional user may find a need and use for a new feature, but for 99% of the people, Office was overkill 2 generations ago.
Every time we ‘upgrade’ to a new version of Office, we are greeted with groans of disapproval from our users… they like it ‘as-is’. They write memos and do some basic spreadsheets… that’s it. Basically the only reason we upgrade is to please some corporate muck-a-muck that needs to justify his job by putting “Rolled out new version” in his next performance review.
It’s just like the new MS “Vista”… so far all looks but no substance. And no interesting reason to go through the hassle of an upgrade.
MS has run out of ideas. They are basically applying new colors and more chrome to existing products, with nothing new underneath. It’s what happens when a company gets too big. Same thing with Adobe… is there a worse image browser than the new “Bridge”? One man shops produce better software!
If there were a good free emulator that runs all all programs requiring Win-98 only, then Linux would be posed to eliminate Microsoft. I say free, because if it costs as much as Windows itself, emulating is just plain dumb.
Did they ever clarify if the file formats will be XML for sure, so it’s cross compatible with other applications, or was that a pipe dream?
I switched to OpenOffice before I left the Wonderful World of Windows. Now, using a Mac [after 22 years], I’ve switched to NeoOffice/J.
In both instances, all my old files were compatible and I didn’t miss a beat with my clients.
MS Bob anyone?
I don’t care if they want to “revolutionize the UI as we know it” as long as they leave me the old way. Which naturally, they haven’t.
Do these morons not understand the fact that not everyone has a 21 inch monitor staring at them? People are mostly at 1024 X 768 which will be awful cramped with that much crap on the screen. While people are getting better and better resolutions, there are now a whole generation of corporate types with subnote laptops that are tiny. How are they supposed to use this new version? Edit two lines at a time?
I have a beautiful subnote that’s at 1024 X 768 and sometimes the screen gets small, so I customize all the toolbars to be small and unobtrusive. I leave only the stuff I need which leaves one line of toolbars only. They fact that these guys don’t even leave me that as an option would make me refuse to upgrade.
These guys haven’t done anything right in years. They play catchup with Apple and Google, and then “innovate” pain into their applications. Have they heard of user groups?
Ah well, it’ll quietly die like their other failures, and then we’ll all go back to normal. With market share like they have they can afford to toss out crap and see what happens. Feels like a university psychology experiment…
[PAPERCLIP]
It looks like you’re writing a complaint column about Microsoft. Would you like me to:
A) Delete it.
B) Tell you how much better OS X is?
C) Tell you how much better *nix is?
D) Label it as pornography so it will be blocked?
I’m sticking with Office 2000, thank you very much.
Brady J. Frey, great one! I’m still laughing. Office “cross compatible with other applications”!!!! That’s a hoot!
To Wm. Phillips, if you reread the last line of my post, I thought the Ribbon might be useful and even beneficial. The issue I have is forcing users to this and nothing else which I see as arrogant.
As others pointed out, will macros which expect specific menu items convert correctly? And the cost to retrain could be significant. So many questions.
It’s one thing for Apple (with OS-X) or even Microsoft (DOS-Windows) to force a complete change in everything. You’re starting from scratch. But here you are simply adding a feature which may or may not be useful to everyone, and very well might incurr a significant cost to the user, without providing backward capability for those who want to ease into it. Add it now parallel with the old way, then in some future version, when you’re certain your customers also think it’s the only way they want to work, only then take out the old.
They left in the Classic Start Menu and other “old” Windows ways in XP. Why not this? And don’t get me started on not being consistent and putting the Ribbon into all Office programs if it’s so great.
I sometimes wonder if Bill has issues with self-loathing. A need to be hated. Why else consistantly do things that generate anger?
here’s a fix for Office 12’s oddities: OpenOffice.org 🙂
The article slams Clippy and the other animated, interactive characters in Office, but Power Pup was my friend and inspiration for a long while. He had a cape and he flew in to rescue me from boring document preparation and saved the day. Until they took him out in a later version. You killed Power Pup, you bastards!
In response to comment #6, Wine (short for Wine is Not an Emulator in the grand tradition of semi-negative recursive acronyms) recently got a big boost to the code which InstallShield needs (Surprisingly, InstallShield is one of the most demanding apps to emulate) as well as it’s first dose of support for WinXP themes.
I don’t think it’ll be much longer before Linux CAN run all the apps you need from Windows.
“Brady J. Frey, great one! I’m still laughing. Office “cross compatible with other applications”!!!! That’s a hoot!
Comment by Ima Fish — 9/14/2005 @ 9:57 am”
Believe me, I’m not promoting it, I’ve been using NeoOffice for a long time now (and switching off between ThinkFree) — but I remember chat, and Scoble rambling about it as well. I wondered if they just flat stopped talking about it or decided to move forward. But, standards and microsoft, well, don’t mix.
I use Office 2000. I can’t think of anything I need or want to do that it can’t. I have gotten used to the layout, good or bad. The only reason I upgraded from Office 97 was because my employer paid for it.
Now, why should I use a different word processor or spread sheet? If someone wants me to read a document then please send it in a format I can read without changing my existing programs. Micro$oft set the standard formats with WORD and EXCEL. The rest of the world now recognizes them. Don’t go getting funky on me and change everything.
And I want my hard drive to hold the photos and video I take. I don’t want it taken up with more bloated programs with features I will never use.
The thing is is that by the time this rolls out MS won’t even try to sell any more. They’ll coerce corporate buyers or if that doesn’t work they’ll send the stubborn company in question’s legal department a letter with all sorts of veiled threats about security and copyright violation ala SCO. It’ll work! We at home may have nothing to do with this product but the corporations will all get it and then we will be the ones getting the veiled threats if we don’t adopt.
Sorry Dave, it wasn’t my intent to wrongly attribute your post to John.
I appreciate your comments. It is my understanding there will be compatability and,it sounds like even a way to access old menu structures. MS actually does think of its buyers of former products (unlike Apple — that too has been a source of criticism for MS) so I don’t think you need worry on that score. But at some point, for technology to move forward, there has to be an advancc and even, at times, radical change. IF this change doesn’t materialize into that sort of paradigm improvement then MS willl reap deserved criticism. But they should be given some room to attempt improvement!
But you are right, it will incur costs for sure. Question is, will those costs be absorbed by improvements in procuctivity in the long run?
Every iteration of Office has added more useless features, more irritating defaults. From Office 97 through Office 2003 I’ve kept thinking that it was only a matter of time before the whole package would become totally unusable. Could this be the one?
Will this version run better through terminal services? We have not been able to upgrade to Office 2003 because it is much slower than Office XP for our terminal service environment at our school.
Comparing the Konfabulator deal to an Office shift? Making a living using Microsoft products to develop programs that run on Microsoft server Products? Apple loves big icons? Now I see who this silly ribbon thing is being targeted at. Change should be a product of improvement people, not a transparent bottom line ploy. To this day my jaw drops at the fact that anyone out there spends precious, irreplacable time from their life developing for M$. What in the hell is the matter with you people?
Ultimately people will use whatever their school or employer uses.
If those schools or employers are like mine, they will immediately jump on Gates’ latest tripe and buy every license they can, regardless of what the users may prefer. This happened to me when I had wordperfect 6 at home which was easy and ideal, and my school switched to office 97. They didn’t work well together.
I’d have loved to use OpenOffice in college, but its spreadsheet simply didn’t support all the advanced functions I needed, and after having classes in MS’s stuff it takes time to switch to something else and re-learn how to do all my old tricks. Ultimately I used Office 2000 like my college had.
Personally I’m getting really, really tired of these random interface changes because MS wants to follow Apple’s aesthetics and say “ME TOO!” As it is, I’m going to need a really compelling reason to switch from office 2k3. I’m sure MS will break the file formats and force all their users to switch.