Eric Lundquist’s recent article about the need for Microsoft Office to retire furthers my opinion of the wide gulf that exists between some technology journalists and real life out there in cubicle land. I am not talking about the next big sexy cloud computing platform or latest mobile computing apps but the people who do the day-to-day grunt work – crunching spreadsheets in accounting, writing technical documents, creating small databases, and presentation development for next week’s sales team meeting.
I take a holistic view of Microsoft Office born from my professional experience. As a working technical writer (Hi, to all my friends in cubicle land!), I have to use Microsoft Office for writing my documents. It’s a client requirement in most cases especially on United States federal government contracts like I am working on now. During this time, I supported the rollout of a new version of Microsoft Office in a federal agency; developed and delivered training workshops on mid-level to advanced Microsoft Office topics; and spent much time troubleshooting Word and document issues. Off and on, through my career, I’ve also written about Microsoft Office topics for some online and print technology publications. Early on in my career, I was the technical reviewer for some Microsoft Office books where I had to verify the technical accuracy of steps and procedures spanning some of the Office suites more ubiquitous features.
Microsoft Office In Daily Business
There is a lot of business that happens in large and small organizations alike on top of Microsoft Office that just isn’t sexy or glamorous enough to garner page views that technology publications require to feed their machines. Technology journalists seem to miss some of the operational elements/costs that ensue from switching to a new Office productivity suite including:
- User support
- User training
- Rebuilding templates
- Recreating macros
- Recreating spreadsheet formulas
There is also the time spent resolving document issues when you send a document to a client or partner who hasn’t made the choice to move away from Microsoft Office. Not to mention what about the time it takes to convert and troubleshoot the gigs upon gigs of Microsoft Office documents sitting on corporate servers.
When you are a one-man shop like typical technology journalists it is easy to make a switch. It’s a different story when an application suite like Microsoft Office is baked into a myriad of major and minor processes that collect revenue, get the bills paid, and ensure that an organization’s customers are served. Throw in a user community with disparate computer skills then some challenges can crop up that could get in the way of conducting business operations as normal.
Emotional Responses vs. Daily Business Operations
Microsoft Office certainly elicits an emotional response from its users. There is no denying that. I’ve had my share of frustrations lately myself especially with Office 2010. However, none of my frustrations regardless of how eloquently I pose them to my customers is going to get them to move away from Microsoft Office for the bulk of their Office productivity tasks because they’ve made investments in time and resources that are hard to go back on. Unless it makes a lot of business sense and there are significant cost savings to be had, retiring Microsoft Office just isn’t going to be a priority especially in resource strapped organizations watching their IT budgets.
While there are some exciting happenings with cloud Office suites like Google Apps for Business, including some enterprise wins, retiring Office isn’t going to make business sense for everybody because they have a list of more pressing priorities of where to spend their IT budgets.
How many Microsoft Office documents are sitting on your organization’s network?
