This week Microsoft released the beta test version of their new version of Office, boringly known as Office 11. The release went out to beta testers for Windows 2000 and XP, but it soon became obvious that the Windows 95, 98 and ME testers were being excluded. Why? Because Microsoft has decided to stop supporting those older operating systems. In fact, Windows 2000 requires Service Pack 3. The reason is Microsoft wants to use the newer version 2 Windows installer program, which makes installations much simpler.
"It looks like Microsoft is sort of moving support for operating systems to 32-bit OSes," Paul DeGroot (a Microsoft analyst) said. "It may make (Office 11) a more stable release if it's on these fully 32-bit platforms."
This version of Office is intended to target the enterprise customer. Gytis Barzdukas, Microsoft's director of Office product management, said it "will be more oriented to the enterprise customer."
With this release, Microsoft is changing the Office suite to use XML as an additional file format. The intention is to allow data to be interchanged between Office and applications. This would tend to make Office applications far more valuable to the business world.
In addition, it would (according to Gartner analyst Michael Silver), "make Office less of a commodity. People think they can come in with StarOffice and replace Office because all they're getting is commodity word processing and a spreadsheet (through Office)."
Why is this important? Many business managers are beginning to balk at the huge price of the Office suite, and believe they can simply replace office with a competing product such as WordPerfect or OpenOffice. After all, most users only have very straightforward requirements: they need word processing and spreadsheets. So why spend hundreds of dollars per person every few years for something so basic and simple?
The decision by Microsoft to drop support for older operating systems immediately produced a huge amount of whining ... yet I would question how long a company is expected to support older, obsolete software. In addition, Windows 95, 98 and ME are inherently insecure, and dropping them supports Microsoft's new security focus.
The problem that I have with the Office suite is simply that it has more than enough functionality for our users. In fact, our users tend to actually use about 5% of the product. In addition, with the release of Office 2000 the suite achieved everything that we would ever want. We have no plans to upgrade at all, simply because we have no further requirements for the suite at all.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.