In the screenshot above, see the problem? Don’t you love informational dialog boxes like that? Not a big deal, it’s a beta test intended to route out the gremlins.

It’s funny, earlier today on the way to lunch I was telling Kara that I’ve decided not to buy Office 2007 when it comes out at the end of this month, and then I get home and see the article mentioned below. We didn’t buy Office 2003 either, instead receiving multiple copies in exchange for beta testing Microsoft products at Redmond headquarters, and that’s how we’re planning on getting Office 2007. In fact, already one license is in the hopper for watching some Microsoft videos.

Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal has been using Office 2007 for a couple months and weighs in:

If you’d like to get more out of Office, especially in the area of how your documents look, Office 2007 is a big step forward, and worth the steep learning curve it imposes. If you’re happy with Office now, or you mostly create plain documents where formatting and design aren’t high priorities, it may not be worth the effort to buy and learn the new version.

The picture at the top of the post shows I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 beta from this machine. I didn’t like that files created using Word 2007 weren’t backwards compatible. Might be a copout on my part but it seems like Microsoft wants to force you to buy too many licenses for basic essential uses, stuff that they could exploit their Live brand to do. I understand they’re a business and selling software is their bread and butter but they have to look around at the competitive environment. Open source and ad-supported offerings have made the field more competitive. I may not want to look at ads with every thing I’m doing on the computer, but it’s a compelling option for the ’sometimes’ activities.

For example, why can’t I share OneNote pages with non-One Note users through some sort of Live interface? I could understand them having to buy the software to create and share their own documents but why can’t they collaborate and view online through a minimalist OneNote Live interface? This makes sense, doesn’t it? Alas, this doesn’t appear to be part of the plan.

OneNote is the only Office 2007 application I’m really interested in using in the suite. Word? Perhaps a little but I don’t mind using Open Office and Google Docs. Outlook? Outlook 2003 sucked bad, and people are still leaving comments on how Outlook 2003 breaks at startup. If Microsoft couldn’t — or wouldn’t — figure out a patch to fix Office 2003 some 4 years old, why should I buy into Outlook 2007 fixing issues of similar magnitude? And I should pay for this … why?

It was refreshing to see the extended, active beta session for both Vista and Office 2007 and while I didn’t take part in the Vista testing, I was somewhat active in the latter. I am planning on buying at least one license of Vista. We just bought our son a computer and he’s getting a free Vista upgrade to replace the Media Center 2005, so there will be two Vista powered machines in our group. Whether or not we’ll buy more remains unanswered.

While Google Docs (disclaimer: I’m a GOOG shareholder) doesn’t have the fancy features, we have used that for collaborating on documents from remote locations several times. I’ve turned our oldest teenager onto Google Docs for writing reports and then sharing back to our office so it can be printed. Others might be bashing Google Docs & Spreadsheets, but we’ve found a couple real world uses for it that seem more attractive to me than paying a couple hundred dollars per seat to get into the Office grab bag of features.

There are definite advantages to using a local wordprocesser but I’m not yet convinced Microsoft has thought through their Live strategy in the more competitive 2007 landscape. Small business owners like us care about the bottom line and the wisdom in expensing thousands of dollars to upgrade machines (we have 5 business machines, so to put Office 2007 standard on all five would cost $399 x 5 = $1,995 + tax) has to be analyzed critically and carefully. Wouldn’t we be smarter to spend that money on marketing and advertising?

We use Excel a couple times a quarter. Powerpoint? Don’t do presentations for groups often enough to care. Outlook? Already stated that’s a no go based on past negative experience. Word? I’m ambivalent there. My favorite program in the suite OneNote is on the Tablet PC, but we only own one of those. We might buy another Tablet PC in 2007, so I suppose that’s a possibility.

These reasons are why we’re not going to be buying Office 2007. It’s not because the programs suck and aren’t an improvement in some areas — I think the ribbon looks better than the old toolbar for example — but because I don’t think we’ll use it enough to justify the expense. I like to buy new stuff when it comes out but there is a big caveat: it needs to be something we will or very possibly might use.

How about you? Will you be using any of the Office 2007 products/services? Planning on buying one or more licenses on launch day at the end of the month?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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