Is it me or does any one else think Bill has (again) taken the opening voiceover from the Outer Limits too much to heart?
“There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousands channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.”
Office 12 changes – The “Ribbon.” With one fell swoop, this all-encompassing UI conceit mostly replaces drop-down menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, and task panes as we know them. The Ribbon is an oversized area at the top of the screen that holds formatting tools for an array of Office options. It’s broken down into multiple panels, and the tools change both at your command and in context as you work with different elements in a document.
One of the first questions out of my mouth at our demo was, “Is there a ‘Go Back to the Old Office look and feel’ mode?” The answer is…no, absolutely not. Microsoft’s so confident in this new approach that it’ll be the only interface option in Office 12.
I think confidence is not the only reason. Could it be Bill is feeling the heat himself?
When Office 12 ships, OpenOffice.org will suddenly sport the “old” interface. The same holds true for WordPerfect, which has lately been following a “We’re a lot like Microsoft Office, only more affordable” strategy. That’s not necessarily a knock on those products–actually, it might turn out to be a major point in their favor, since they’ll presumably still sport the look and feel which the world is familiar with, while Office 12 will be an unknown quantity. But at the very least, the question “From a typical user’s standpoint, how are Microsoft Office and cheaper alternatives different?” will have a number of strikingly clear new answers.
Maybe this will turn out to be a good design feature, but the lack of backward compatibility is simply arrogant.
Will this version run better through terminal services? We have not been able to upgrade to Office 2003 because it is much slower than Office XP for our terminal service environment at our school.
Comparing the Konfabulator deal to an Office shift? Making a living using Microsoft products to develop programs that run on Microsoft server Products? Apple loves big icons? Now I see who this silly ribbon thing is being targeted at. Change should be a product of improvement people, not a transparent bottom line ploy. To this day my jaw drops at the fact that anyone out there spends precious, irreplacable time from their life developing for M$. What in the hell is the matter with you people?
Ultimately people will use whatever their school or employer uses.
If those schools or employers are like mine, they will immediately jump on Gates’ latest tripe and buy every license they can, regardless of what the users may prefer. This happened to me when I had wordperfect 6 at home which was easy and ideal, and my school switched to office 97. They didn’t work well together.
I’d have loved to use OpenOffice in college, but its spreadsheet simply didn’t support all the advanced functions I needed, and after having classes in MS’s stuff it takes time to switch to something else and re-learn how to do all my old tricks. Ultimately I used Office 2000 like my college had.
Personally I’m getting really, really tired of these random interface changes because MS wants to follow Apple’s aesthetics and say “ME TOO!” As it is, I’m going to need a really compelling reason to switch from office 2k3. I’m sure MS will break the file formats and force all their users to switch.