You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft’s group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don’t call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft’s enormously successful desktop business — the jewel of which is Office XP — into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. Read the interview at InfoWorld.
Jeff Raikes Outlines the Future Role of Office
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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With all the WPA, and cost of MS Office, I find it rather rediculous that it sells as well as it does. Office 2000 is the last version that I will use that is released by MS. If thier price was fair (around $60.00) I would actually buy office. But for almost $700.00, I can find better things to buy than an office suite. I didnt have to pay 1 dime for my copy of Office 2000 Premium. My friend upgraded to Office P and threw his copy away. So I fished it out of the trash, and I have a actual liscense to use it, and it was all for free. If it wouldnt be for that, I would hav just used OOo 1.0. If I need anything newer than 2000, I will go to OOo. MS is getting a little money hungry. They wont get 1 more dime from me. I have XP, and that is as high a I go.
Now MS tries to tell us, how they are innovative, while I do remember old good Lotus WordPro96, introducing collaborative capabilities. Maybe not comparable, but anyway 🙂
Cheers,
-pekr-
“With all the WPA, and cost of MS Office, I find it rather rediculous that it sells as well as it does.”
I think most people have it because it comes ‘free’ on a lot of PCs. I don’t know anyone who’s actually gone out and bought the shrink-wrapped package.
Tip: If all you’re after is Word, check out Works Suite 2002. Costs about $100, comes with Word, Streets & Trips 2002 (beats the pants off any map sites you’ll find on the web – an open source alternative is badly needed, and is one of the reasons I am still using Windows), and a couple of other things (Mooney 2002 I think, not sure).
Word by itself will cost you $200 at least, unless you can get your hands on the academic version.
If you just need Word how about you just use Open Office and pay 0?
Buying an office suite today is like upgrading from a wheel to a wheel. Office suites are paid enough for, now let them be MIT or BSD.
If you for some reason wouldn’t like OO, just try Gobe Productive, it’s as good as you’ll gonna need a word app to be…
heck.. i wont buy office for 700.. its completely rediculus.. not for what i use it for. i have abiword and open office.. and soon i will have gobe productive.. released under a new name i guess.. whenever it open sources..
i think microsoft is just going to loose more and more ground with office.. they are already at the top.. and now other companies are going to pull the same trick M$ pulled on netscape. the companies who GPL’d their office suites are going to kill office. microsoft can only loose ground in office now.. its going to get to the point where they will HAVE to bundle office with windows just so people will be forced to pay for an office program. there are so many great free office programs now it amazes me.
In all fairness Microsoft offers the best office suite around. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Visio, FrontPage, Picture IT, Outlook and Project; is a pretty powerful lineup of apps. I’ve only had to add one business app outside the Microsoft framework (MindManager) for a complete business suite.
I think open source advocates should stop kidding ourselves here. Open Office isn’t even close to this strong of a lineup. App by app its much weaker. Its hard to think of a single area that offers better performance than Office. That’s not to say open source won’t get there but it isn’t there now.
That doesn’t even count the issue of extensions. For example when we were discussing Office replacements my wife mentioned automatic bibliography handeling which Word has (with extensions) and Open Office doesn’t. That feature alone would be enough to justify the purchase price for her for the entire office suite. After Excel passed Lotus 1-2-3 in features the extensions are what helped to keep Lotus alive; its going to be a long time till open source programs have these extensions.
I think a much better approach with office suites is to go after inexpensive markets: getting OEMs to bundle the suite for nothing along with the systems that don’t include office, going after the K-12 market, going after the people searching on download.com, going after the people in a retail store who are price sensitive. Also minority platforms like: Unixes, MVS (hasn’t had a major business suite upgrade since the 1980’s) are easy pickings. Finally Mac due to MSOffice’s much weaker offering and steeper price should be doable.
Its entirely likely to justify a corporate shift in the PC market that open source office suites will need to be substantially better than MSOffice. We are years away from that.
What you are all missing is the fact that Microsoft is moving into the Mid-Market because they realize that their Office suite no longer positions them into businesses the way it did over the past years.
That’s why they purchased Great Plains over a year aga and Navision in Europe last month. Both now come under the new “Microsoft Business Solutions” division.
With the release of “Microsoft CRM” they are on there next “embrace, extinguish and conquer” initiative. They have frozen the CRM (Customer Relationship Management)Market for the real CRM packages available and are coming out with a 1.0 release that isn’t even as good as ACT! But companies are like deers in the headlights because this is a M$ product.
Siebel and PeopleSoft have had their sales cycles frozen since February. No one’s buying CRM now. Another M$ vaporware tactic.
Microsoft realizes Office can’t go much further other than the home market. They are moving into a market with big players by undercutting them (SAP, PeopleSoft, Sage LLC., Oracle, IBM, Sieble, KMPG, etc.).
Microsoft CRM will be the first truly C# application Microsoft ships with monopolistic back-end into Exchange Server they’ll never share with other CRM venders. All the other utilize SQL etc., but there’s your M$ hook…
brewski
Microsoft has always been the high volume low cost provider. That strategy doesn’t work against Linux but against People Soft, Siebel… I don’t think they’ll have much problem.
“Its entirely likely to justify a corporate shift in the PC market that open source office suites will need to be substantially better than MSOffice. We are years away from that.”
Yes, I think so too, and I think that goes for ALL app categories, not just office suites.
Those Linux users who scream about the superiority of their OS based on technical merits are missing the point entirely. Because I am an ‘application-centric’ person myself, I don’t give a ding dong didley what your uptime is. I turn my computer off every night before going to bed anyway
Would Openoffice do better if there weren’t so many copies of Office 2000 Premium on CD-R floating around?
If thier price was fair (around $60.00) I would actually buy office.
Heck, even Sun and Gobe sell their stuff higher than $60..
But for almost $700.00
Since you rather use OOo, the more realitic price is $400.
However, unless you are using Linux or Solaris, I couldn’t get any sane reason why you would use OOo 1.0 over Office XP, since to you, both are free? For me, Office XP is faster than OOo (and that’s reason enough for me :-). Better spell checking. Database. Etc. I’m wondering, why?
Now MS tries to tell us, how they are innovative, while I do remember old good Lotus WordPro96, introducing collaborative capabilities. Maybe not comparable, but anyway 🙂
The idea of collabration is much older than Lotus. But technically, SharePoint is very different from the thing in WordPro (was it 95, and what was the feature called?). At least, that’s what I read :-p.
But I doubt I would use SharePoint until Microsoft could prove that its server software is secure.
I think most people have it because it comes ‘free’ on a lot of PCs. I don’t know anyone who’s actually gone out and bought the shrink-wrapped package.
Darius, you made this claim a lot of times. What prove is there that most Office users are users of the OEM version? Well, I didn’t check for XP, but most of Office 2000 users are using corporate-discounted versions.
If you just need Word how about you just use Open Office and pay 0?
Well, I don’t really want to waste time listing all the features useful to me in Word 2002 that isn’t found in OOo. But the best feature is no doubt a better spell checker (that does UK English well), a grammar checker, it is much faster, and also using WordArt is much easier and faster than in OOo (don’t have to load another component).
If you for some reason wouldn’t like OO, just try Gobe Productive, it’s as good as you’ll gonna need a word app to be…
Oh, even more horid than OOo on the feature scale. I like its speed, but it doesn’t have all the features I like about Word 2002.
heck.. i wont buy office for 700.. its completely rediculus.. not for what i use it for. i have abiword and open office..
Oh, Microsoft altenative for AbiWord is WordPad.
…and now other companies are going to pull the same trick M$ pulled on netscape.
How?
Not the same trick as Netscape. Besides, Sun decided to charge for StarOffice because that is what business users wanted..
think a much better approach with office suites is to go after inexpensive markets: getting OEMs to bundle the suite for nothing along with the systems that don’t include office
Sun isn’t too well with that (probably they have been criticising most of the companies that make out 30-40% of the OEM market.
But anyway, SmartSuite is bundled with IBM PCs, WordPerfect in Sony…
Siebel and PeopleSoft have had their sales cycles frozen since February. No one’s buying CRM now. Another M$ vaporware tactic.
A more rationale explanation is that most companies are cutting cost, and a lot of them don’t have a sales team that really uses CRM software. Go out and survey: how many companies actually use CRM to enchance their consumer relationship?
Microsoft CRM will be the first truly C# application Microsoft ships with monopolistic back-end […]
Whoa! I didn’t know Microsoft was a monopoly of the backend market. Nor the office market. The only monopolisitc power it has is in the desktop market. But that monopoly title would soon dissapear, as Linux’s growth in Asia is quite high, compared to Windows growth. (Legal copies, not pirated 🙂
Would Openoffice do better if there weren’t so many copies of Office 2000 Premium on CD-R floating around?
Probably :-D. But piracy is here to stay. If people can’t even buy a $40-50 game, even if Microsoft slashes the price to $60, piracy would still be rampant. The problem is that many people think it is okay, think they don’t owe Microsoft a cent.
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BTW, I do hope that Office 11 would be called Office 11 when they market it. I really wish Microsoft would start using version numbers, or year numbers instead of stuff like XP. Office 10 sounds much better than Office XP. Plus, Microsoft lacks consistency among products. WIndows XP and Office XP has the “XP” tag, while Windows CE and Windows NT5.1 for Servers uses “.NET”.
Yeah, I know, Office 11 is Office .Net…. but maybe Office .NET 11….
Those Linux users who scream about the superiority of
their OS based on technical merits are missing the point
entirely. Because I am an ‘application-centric’ person myself, I don’t give a ding dong didley what your uptime is. I turn my computer off every night before going to bed anyway :
Darius –
Uptime is mildly useful to the home user. Extremely unstable systems (crash every 2 hrs or less) have usually been seen as a severe negative. Where uptime really matters is things like embedded systems; for example one of the key markets for an embedded system is inside of deep oil pipes as regulators. The cost of digging out a $10 part that crashes and won’t reboot can easily be $1m. The ability to talk to a paniced kernal is worth a great deal more than a good office suite under these conditions. On the server side things are usually not that extreme but for example, I’m likely to be designing some Linux servers that will have about $4k in hardware but will likely cost the company $50k+ everytime they’d crash after the initial test period (needless to say the goal is to design them so that never happens). Incidentally neither one of those example systems even needs a user interface, there are no human users. At those prices reliability matters a great deal more than features, user friendliness… More importantly customers don’t tend to have opinions about embedded system OSes: do you are what OS you car’s brake system runs? My point being these arguments regarding uptime are generally not intended for you so much as other people for whom technical merits matter a great deal.
This is a flaw in the discussions that often occur on OSes, mixing what are IMHO the 5 real catagories:
a) home / small business
b) corporate desktop
c) embedded system
d) server
e) enterprise servers
issues for one do not necc. apply to the others.
The other thing to realize is that for many current Linux users their primary applications are things like gcc, scripting languages, TeX, etc… which are much easier to use under Unix. Their office needs are often quite light so they don’t get much benefit from the additional features of MSOffice over a cheaper office suite… That for example is why I find the idea of OSX so appealing; about 1/2 the time I need business applications to work well, and about 1/2 the time I need scripting to work well. MSWindows gives me the excellent business applications but is not a satisfacotry choice on the programming side; Linux is vice versa.