@Ribbon Lovers
You have completely missed the point. Allow me the time to enlighten you. Microsoft is a corporation. This corporation sells us a product that we can choose to buy – or not – at our leisure. There are competing products available, many rapidly approaching “good enough.” Open Office is – for the large part – already there.
What does this mean? Put simply, if you are not required to use Microsoft Office as part of the terms of your employment (as I sadly am) then you are not required to use it at all. This has some interesting side effects. The first of which is that you are perfectly free to simply not buy it if the product doesn’t meet your requirements!
This is where the ribbon comes in. Not everything “new” is automatically “good.” Certainly in the real world “newer” does not automatically translate into “better.” (E.g. “the new Coke” or any GM car made between 1995 and 2009.) If Microsoft decides to change the interface on their product to something I personally find counterintuitive, then who are they – indeed, who are YOU – to suggest I should simply suck it up and use this product I don’t want anyways?
The point is that I don’t have to. I can use an alternative product and be far happier and more productive than I would be if I chose to stick with Microsoft Office. Don’t get me wrong – I love Office 2003. I still have it in use on my VM, and I would gladly have bought Office 2003 for the missus and myself when we replaced our PCs.
I don’t happen to like Office 2007/2010 because of that damned ribbon. Microsoft produced something that I – the customer – didn’t want to buy. There was zero incentive for me to spend money to purchase this software that didn’t meet my requirements when a perfectly usable and free alternative that behaves exactly as I want it to behave is available. Thus Microsoft lost out on the funds I had set aside for a software refresh. Not only did they lose my money for Office…but without the requirement to support office I simply had no reason to install Windows.
Without Windows on my desktop PCs, I really didn’t see the point in maintaining an SBS install at home. Thus Microsoft has lost – by my most current count – five copies of Windows 7, one copy of Small Business Server and four copies of Microsoft Office in my household alone. All of the previous versions of this software are in the midst of being replaced with a fully licensed Redhat stack.
The lesson here isn’t one of “suck it up, cry-babies.” The lesson here is that Microsoft isn’t a government. They aren’t our employers. They have no means of requiring us to consume a product beyond actually making a product we want to consume!
In this Microsoft appear to have failed. I am a Small to Medium Enterprise systems administrator. I used to write a sysadmin blog around here on El Reg. A little perusal of this blog would tell you that the environments I support are largely Microsoft. What is of interest is that of the twenty-four networks I maintain all but two of them view Microsoft as “legacy software.” It is maintained only because they have a handful of applications that require its existence. In every other instance, these folks – SME folks with little training – are abandoning Microsoft in droves for Linux or OSX. This is not at my insistence: the choices were made by the business owners. I was brought in because I know a fair amount about making Microsoft products coexist with Linux as is required during a transition away from Microsoft.
When I asked each of these business owners “why are you undertaking this expensive transition away from Microsoft software” the answers are fairly consistent. They all boil down to “Microsoft has stopped delivering us the kind of software we actually want. Instead they are delivering us software that locks us in and locks us down whilst delivering us nothing new of value. If we wanted that, we’d buy Apple.”
And so they did.
There’s a lesson here. The lesson is not so simplistic as “people fear change” or “the customer is always right.” The less is thus:
The individuals who actually pay you for your work will only submit to such an arrangement so long as one of two conditions are true:
1) You produce work of a quality that enhances the quality of life of the individual purchasing your work.
2) Your produce a vital good and there are no alternatives available.
For many people the world over – including the nontechnical types – Microsoft is no longer producing a product that enhances the quality of life for those who purchase it. What’s more, they no longer have a monopoly. With alternatives available, zero worthwhile leadership, warring fiefdoms inside the company and a complete lack of worthwhile products capable of meeting increasing competition I have to agree with all the SME owners who contract me to work on their networks:
Microsoft software is legacy software. Treat it as such.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
