[mso] Re: Office 2003 Launch in NYC - an OT grumble :VSMail mx3
- From: James LaBorde <jlaborde@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 11:38:10 -0800
Greg,
I know that most of the major companies behave in this fashion. My problem
with the behavior is that although they initially improve their product, the
product that was better than theirs in the first place is killed. This
prevents the superior product from being a motivator to continue improving
theirs. (Symantec is probably the worst offender in this area.) M$ sees
only its bottom line. They think nothing of taking advantage of how
companies budget and Assets are handled. The mere fact that M$ comes out
with a new product is not a reason for companies to blow their budget on the
new product. They can't afford to and their competition for the most part
can't either. If M$ was smart they would plan their major upgrades to
coincide with the Accounting Life Cycle of software. I know that the
general Accounting Principles that we follow within our industry (and from
what I have learned from talking with others in many industries) provide for
a 36 month depreciation schedule for software. Most companies are reluctant
to replace software until that depreciation schedule is complete. At one
time M$ did this and did quite well. Look at the OS Schedule: Win 95, Win
98 and Office 97, 2000. Someone in charge of this area must have left the
company about '99 or so because that is when they stopped doing that. This
is not to say that they can't improve their product every year if they
choose to, but don't expect every company to rush out and purchase the
latest and greatest of your new product as soon as it comes out.
M$ is finally learning that companies will not rush out and buy their latest
just because they say it is the best out there. The last survey I saw
showed that 35 - 40 % of businesses are still using NT 4 as their network
OS. They were forced to extend support on the product since so many users
are still using it. They are again attempting to end support on the
product, but we will see if it actually happens this time. Office is
starting to be like Windows, if there is a new version out every year or
two, sometimes with a steep learning curve to go along with it, then it
isn't worth constantly upgrading.
I am sorry to carry on this rant. The way M$ is doing business lately is
bothering me a great deal. You would be surprised at some of the stuff they
have pulled. Did you know for instance that many financial institutions and
healthcare facilities had issues with installing Win XP or one of the SPs
for Win 2K? The way M$ worded the new EULA made it a potential violation of
various laws in those industries. Most have since installed the SP or XP
because not doing so would have proven disasterous as far as security goes.
One final thought. I may have to accept what M$ does, but I don't have to
like it.
I'll try to stop the rant now. Sorry to those who may have been offended.
James
-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Chapman [mailto:greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 10:56 AM
To: mso@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [mso] Re: Office 2003 Launch in NYC - an OT grumble :VSMail mx3
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
>
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