[mso] Re: Office 2003 Launch in NYC - an OT grumble :VSMail mx3
- From: "Greg Chapman" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 12:56:12 -0600
I'll revert back to an earlier stance that I have measured to be a more
accurate way of dealing with software upgrading; you don't have a choice
about whether to upgrade no matter what your software or hardware product
is. Buying into a solution is not a one-time event nor are the costs. If a
business goes into the purchase with this in mind and as part of its
expenditure planning, they tend to find managing technology to be much
easier.
Your customers who are on 97 and remaining there are simply placing
unpinned grenades in their own shorts and that's not just based on their
security issues. They begin to incur larger maintenance costs with time,
fall further behind the curve of their partners and competitors and get
the 'benefit' of less and less available support. It would be extremely
foolish of Microsoft or Sun or any software developer to target this form
of market support for several reasons not least of which is the fact that
they already invested in supporting those issues in the next version of
the product.
The security measures you highlighted in Outlook were knee-jerk, there is
no doubt. But you should see what the admins do to the systems if you
think that was a tough move! Most users in environments where the worm
attacks failed do things are administered by people who did things like
disabling the preview pane, keeping local users OUT of the local
administrators group (very smart but it means no user may apply a patch or
any other form of software install using their base credentials). And,
besides, the smarter move by MS in the first place would have been to make
sure that the preview and message panes of Outlook and OE could never have
executed a script from message content!
But this is the part of your post which forced me over the 'do I reply?'
cliff:
>I don't hate M$. I make a very good living working with and supporting
>their products. I just hate some of the ways they do business. Maybe if
>they allowed some competition to stay in business rather than buying them
up
>or sueing them to death, they would have to keep competing both in price
and
>in product enhancements.
My brother recently used some words in a very intelligent way as he
explained to me how he felt about his new employers. "Making money by
trading money -- is unappealing". The software industry is built on a
similar dynamic. The best way to build mind share on a technology within
your own company is to buy the company with that mindshare and make it
part of your own. This isn't a singular Microsoft behavior. Go look at
Cisco. Nearly every product they have that *isn't* a router is a
technology they built by buying the company which created the product. And
that's why it's hard to know Cisco IOS and still know enough to work with
all Cisco products, the consistency between devices is so poor. Sun,
Oracle, IBM, Intel...endless list...all behave in this same market
'predatory' way and they use lawsuits in exactly the same way. These are
morally uncomfortable and unappealing behaviors...yet it is how the entire
industry evolves.
There are no angels in *this* world and 'customer' is just another way of
saying 'victim' quite often. But I'm really stretched to the limits to
identify how each succeeding version of Office has failed to meet the
improvement benchmark which justifies selling a new version. I have yet to
see a version of Office that wasn't a marked improvement of its
predecessor and, similarly, have yet to see a business make a statement of
"not enough improvement to warrant the upgrade costs" where Office is
concerned that has also done adequate research to actually know whereof it
speaks. That doesn't mean I'm in love with encapsulating XML into the
products (XML is a vast wasteland at this time and the landscape looks
like Love Canal. I'm afraid it will for a few years yet, too.) but
improving the rendering pane, improving stability and consistency of
objects within the product and making it easier to create expert users is
primarily what the suite is about. I think they hit the mark.
Greg Chapman
http://www.mousetrax.com
"Counting in binary is as easy as 01, 10, 11!
With thinking this clear, is coding really a good idea?"
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:mso-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of James LaBorde
> Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 10:24 AM
> To: 'mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
> Subject: [mso] Re: Office 2003 Launch in NYC - an OT grumble
> :VSMail mx3
>
>
> Dian,
>
> Sorry, I guess I used a bad example. I can understand when there are
> significant changes not being able to open a document in the previous
> version, but when they make minimal changes in an application
> why the need
>
*************************************************************
You are receiving this mail because you subscribed to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx or
MicrosoftOffice@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To send mail to the group, simply address it to mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To Unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
mso-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotes) in
the subject line.
Or, visit the group's homepage and use the dropdown menu. This will also allow
you to change your email settings to digest or vacation (no mail).
//www.freelists.org/webpage/mso
To be able to use the files section for sharing files with the group, send a
request to mso-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and you will be sent an invitation with
instructions. Once you are a member of the files group, you can go here to
upload/download files:
http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/msofiles
*************************************************************
Other related posts:
