Have you heard about the new version of Microsoft Office? Microsoft bets $150 Million you have. The rollout has been accompanied by a massive marketing campaign and a media blitz. Frankly you’d have to be living in a cave — or using a Macintosh — not to have noticed.
Office accounts for a third of Microsoft’s revenues: over $9 Billion dollars annually. It has a huge operating margins too. That being the case, $150 Million in advertising for the new version doesn’t seem like that big a deal, even as part of a half billion dollar marketing budget. But the problem is how to get perfectly happy users to spend $400 on the new version, particularly in an economy that is mediocre at best. In fact, about a third of the registered users haven’t upgraded since 1997. Add more features? Most users only use a fifth of the available features anyway according to Microsoft’s own research.
Badmouthing the old product and adding dubious features most people will never use hardly seems a good answer, particularly considering that Office historically has a large piracy problem. Touting enhanced security will not make people magically flock to the new product either, since most technically literate people believe Microsoft should have made it more secure in the first place.
I think many of us would appreciate an “Office Lite” product: give us the 20-25% most commonly used features of Office for $100. It needs to create and read the major standard filetypes for Word and Excel, it needs a secure but simple email client, and for the sake of argument a stripped down PowerPoint. In an ideal world, it should take up significantly less than 481 megabytes of hard drive space, have a relatively low RAM requirement, and be zippy enough to use on older systems without pain. Oh, and “Help” should not launch Internet Explorer. It is arrogant to assume that the sort of user who chooses this product wants to be connected to the internet every time he or she needs to figure out a new command. There should also be a clear upgrade path to the full product.
Most people simply don’t need half of Office has to offer, and the new version does not make that better. What a shame that most school computer classes seem to revolve around how to use Microsoft products. I would rather see kids learning to program computers than learning to put together PowerPoint presentations. It will be over a decade before this trend impacts Microsoft’s potential pool of programmers.