Microsoft offers peek at next Office suite

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dashboards and scorecards that offer a quick way to visually keep track of just how a business is doing.

Meanwhile, in PowerPoint, Microsoft said it is working to automate more of the graphics features from within the presentation program so workers can create documents that look good without much design effort. The company is also planning to expand its use of XML as a means of sharing data with other programs.

In addition to sharing only the broad strokes of what features will be added to the Office suite itself, Microsoft is also not ready to discuss any new companion products that will be coming with the Office 12 wave of software. In the last go-round, Microsoft added its InfoPath electronic forms program as well as OneNote, a note-taking application.

Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said he expects the Information Worker unit that includes the Office business to continue to introduce new server software as a way to grow its sales.

"I think that unit's business plan, overall, is about the server," Helm said. The Office suite serves as a ubiquitous piece of desktop software upon which Microsoft can fairly easily tie new products, he said.

Raikes was circumspect when asked about Microsoft's reported plans to introduce more server software, including the possibility of an Excel server.

"I'd say with a beta toward the end of this year you will begin to get a good sense of how we are thinking of the overall set of capabilities," Raikes said. "I'm not saying what server products we will release at what time."

As for the desktop software itself, Office 12 will continue the program's evolution from one that enhances individual productivity to one that can also help cubicle dwellers work better together. Here, Microsoft is counting on advances from both its own SharePoint and Real-Time Communications groups as well as from recently acquired Groove Networks, which specializes in such software.

The company has also been working hard to position Office as a good way to connect to other business software such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software from companies such as Siebel and SAP. Microsoft and SAP last month announced a joint effort, code-named Mendocino, aimed at allowing access to SAP data using both the Excel and Outlook components of Office. Meanwhile, Microsoft had an internal effort, known as Project Elixir, in which its own sales force used Office's Outlook program to access information in its Siebel system.

"That offers a glimpse of relief," said AMR Research analyst Jim Murphy. Large businesses, which have been increasingly narrowing their key software vendors, are anxious to see the remaining companies collaborate more, Murphy said. But Murphy noted that customers are also skeptical, seeing the large software players as still angling for each other's turf.

Analysts also said Microsoft cannot afford to focus solely on collaboration and business process automation given that a significant chunk of sales are to small businesses and consumers. With Office 2003, too many of the new features were aimed at that crowd, said Directions on Microsoft's Helm.

"They can't invest all of the improvements in Office in group work," Helm said. "One knock on Office 2003 is that there wasn't much there for the individual user to upgrade."

And AMR's Murphy noted that the individual home user is often a corporate worker who--if they like a new version--can push their company to upgrade. Whereas it often takes big businesses a long time to move to a new version of Office, consumers often move quicker, typically by purchasing a new PC with the latest version of the software installed.

"This is actually a good sort of marketing for Microsoft," he said.

This is the wrong direction for application development

Bill G. needs to take a lession from Unix. "Do one thing well" Look at FireFox. It's a web browser. Email and news are handled by Thunderbird. If I want to edit a web page, I use a text editor, not Netscape 8.0.

[katamari]

Partially agree.

I agree this is the wrong direction for Office to take, but for different reasons. Although I congratulate Microsoft for wanting their Office suite to be XML-compliant, the remaining additions seem to be scatter-brained at best.

Office has had a history of going from small to large to outrageously bloated to small again. A riches-to-rages-to-riches sort-of scenario. I believe Office will slowly begin to transition to that "large" category again, and we're going to eventually end up with quad-CD Office installations like we did 6-7 years ago. On the bright side, at least Microsoft has "standardised" their applications look and feel...

There's too much creeping featurism in many of the Office applications, which is going to be its downfall. I want a word processor, not something that can do tasks for me. Did these guys never have the chance to use AppleWorks for the Apple ][ during their childhood? ;-)

I disagree with your comparison of Office to the "mentality" behind *IX applications and the "Do it right once" mentality. Open-source is living proof no one can do it right once -- but instead, do it again and again and again and never get it right.

[KTLA_knew]

Suite?

Wow, put all those applications together on one system, and you have a new invention you could invent a new term for, perhaps "suite"?

And since it's likely that your web page designer or email client will need some internet functionality (which your browser alreay has), perhaps building these apps so they can leverage each others' capabilities would be in order.

Hmmm, where does that leave you?

[alx359]

not really, it's strategical

Having strong positions in one field (Office) gives them extra synergy for inroads into other apps markets through integration.

But really it's not only about subversive competition. Integrate-all is pivotal as an alternative business model to open-source, implicitly embracing the Unix concept of "one task one app". Only MS and the like can do this as they're an "integrated" monolitical organizations themselves. In the long-term they should prove that integrated software development produces more usable apps for the masses than a big bunch of loosely-coupled apps doing well one task. Both concepts have a rationale and their followers. We shall see.

[bobby_brady]

I still use Office 97

and it works just fine for me!

[System Tyrant]

Office 97

I got a free copy of Office 97 when I went to a Microsoft meeting. I used it for a long time, but now it just collects dust on my shelf. I have since moved on to WordPerfect Office 12.

[Gleeplewinky]

If you're using Office 97...

... then you probably aren't exchanging files
with folks using newer versions of Word (like
Word XP) that introduce new file format
incompatibilities.

One reason our company doesn't upgrade the Win2K
desktops to WinXP is that they hadn't budgeted
for upgrading Office. We are using Office 2K,
which failed the compatibility tests for XP. I
almost had a stroke laughing so hard when I
heard that...

[unknown unknown]

I am the same way..

I haven't found a compelling reason to spend the $200, or whatever Microsoft is asking for Office these days , on a new version when 97 does everything I need. Recent I started using Open Office simply because it's still being supported and actively developed which is good should a security issue come up and it has better support for newer formats.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Why is it only Microsoft Office spreads viruses?

My theory is most consumers of software have a "herd of sheep"-like mentality. Take the MS Office situation.

There is no such thing as an office document macro virus, only a Microsoft Office document macro virus. There are no Corel Word Perfect viruses, no Open Office viruses, etc.

$500 for all the bells and whistles? (And other various Microsoft viruses) Why would anyone in his/her right mind pay that when every other office package is cheaper (or free) as well as more stable, compatible, no viruses, etc? The only thing alternatives are missing is the internal MS Office virus generator. That's a feature I can live without.

[pcLoadLetter]

Don't underestimate the value of viri

Imagine the love you will feel, when MS does you the huge 'favor' of fixing the exploitable code.

You just can't simply put a value on that sort of love. ;)

Let's hope that these products are for real this time around!

Have we all ever given thought to the fact that over time - since the inception of the PC as we have come to know it... how many times there have been upgrades to the various software and hardware products we use - lets say a business plan is to be developed an presented to an international financial institution for funding (most likely certain criteria will have to be met) this can either be completed "manually" or by the use of a computer; but, here is the deal, the specific application/s is/are not available using this new "collaborative" WXY suites that companies Z, Q, M and B have been apparently experimenting with through the availability of yours (and mine) $$$ over the years if this is not the case then what do you do with your old computer/s and software when comes the time for the upgrades (experiments that still cannot meet all your requirements... (why the need to upgrades, I guess some folks did not get it "right" the first time around; that is, the way people work/wish to work or collaborate, communicate or cooperate ;-) ) that again have to be funded by you? Will you still be interested in purchasing these products!!!

;-)