Office 2007: One Year Later
Fraternal twins sometimes follow very different paths, with one sibling greatly excelling above the other. So the fates would appear to be of Office 2007 and Windows Vista, which Microsoft birthed one year ago today.
Birth order would favor Office 2007, which businesses could immediately start testing and deploying, because Microsoft initially released both products only through volume licensing. A year ago, about 40 percent of Office revenue came from volume licensing, while OEMs accounted for about 80 percent of Windows Vista sales. Office 2007 was released through the favored enterprise acquisition channel, but Vista wouldn't be available in its preferred channel, through OEMs, for another two months.
Office 2007 also benefited from another fundamental advantage: IT organizations tend to buy applications, while operating system decisions are predicated by the application choice.
Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis, said that the operating system is "no longer the major reason for buying a PC. The value of your PC isn't the OS but your browser, how fast is your modem, how fast can you get on the Internet. It's your applications."
Office 2007 runs just fine on Windows XP, with no real compelling advantages when used on Windows Vista. Microsoft missed an opportunity to create more interdependence between the products, for which the choice of Office 2007 could also have meant Vista, too. Instead, Office 2007 gave many IT organizations reasons to stick with Windows XP when deploying the productivity suite.
While Microsoft hasn't made any Office 2007-Windows Vista synergy obvious, some solution providers are trying to make the connection for their customers. "We're trying to show our clients that when they do the upgrades do Office 2007 and Vista together," said Steve Rubin, president of WorkITsafe.
For all the reasons many businesses are going slow with Vista, they have good reason to embrace Office 2007. The differences show in adoption rates. A recent Forrester survey found that just 2 percent of businesses had deployed Vista.
By contrast, "Office is doing much better than Vista," said Michael Silver, vice president of Gartner client computing. "Our Symposium survey showed Office at greater than 10 percent installed base versus Vista, which people have delayed about 9 to 12 months. Twice as many orgs as last year said they plan on doing Office 2007 before Vista."
For the first six months of 2007, Office U.S. retail sales increased 59.6 percent, year over year, as measured in dollars, and 58.1 percent in units, according to NPD. Through the end of September, Office accounted for 17.4 percent of all retail PC software, as measured in dollars; the bulk of Office sales are version 2007. When comparing Office 2007 sales to version 2003 during the same early sales period, unit sales of the newer productivity suite are about double the older one, according to NPD.
Another sign that Office is doing well: Microsoft's silence about sales. My mother often warned me about the person who protests too much. Microsoft has been quick to tout the number of Vista licenses shipped—more than 88 million—but has remained mum about Office. One perspective: Microsoft executives are urgent to trumpet success where it is modest. Number of licenses shipped is by no means number deployed, but Microsoft's license counting insinuates otherwise.
The Ribbon Wraps Up Sales
Office 2007's biggest selling point is its major difference from predecessors: The overhauled user interface, which major element Microsoft calls the ribbon. But the dramatic, visually oriented, task-based user interface was a risk, too, given that many IT organizations resist changes. Who hasn't heard some IT manager say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?
Microsoft sought to solve two problems with the new user interface: Customers continually asking for features that had been in the software for years and upgrade resistance from perceptions that little substantially changed version after version.
"I think people like the WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] thing," Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies, said about the new Office 2007 user interface.
Paul DeGroot, Directions on Microsoft's lead analyst for Sales, Support and Desktop Strategies, isn't a fan. "Word 2000 was the pinnacle of Word development, as far as I'm concerned," he said. "Although the ribbon is supposed to give great visibility to stuff that I'm most likely to use, I found it incredibly difficult to find the thing that adds a new slide—surely something that any PowerPoint author is going to use. Apparently it's in some other button somewhere."
Kay sees merits in other new features, like "being able to preview your document in full screen mode without committing to a style. That's nice."
The user interface changes make Office 2007 look and feel dramatically fresh, even though most features are unchanged. They're simply more accessible and usable. By contrast, Windows Vista isn't different enough or improved enough from Windows XP; Vista is more hassle, in fact, when looking at application compatibility and hardware driver problems.
Office 2003 and Windows Vista suffer from the "good enough" syndrome, where previous versions meet most customers needs; no upgrade required. But Office 2007 looks to be better enough for many customers, which is translating into rapid deployments. Windows Vista isn't bad, it's just not better enough compared to XP the way some customers perceive Office 2007 to be compared to its predecessor.
Too many UI changes in Vista feel like change for the sake of change. There aren't enough end-user benefits. While Office 2007 may demand more of users, it also improves productivity—at least that's my experience using the software. Microsoft needs to apply some of the Office 2007 concepts, particularly making hidden features more obvious to end users, to Vista successor Windows 7.
Source: microsoft-watch.com
