...in terms of real cost, my guess is that even if you buy whatever licenses you need/want from Microsoft for whatever software you have a need for, it won't really be that expensive compared to irritating your users (also, just use hosted exchange as $10/month/user should be a non-issue).

Before making any decisions, I'd consider asking your admittedly tiny user base what software/suites they need/want instead of just making blind purchasing decisions

How a person can know the intricacies of double entry bookkeeping but fail to understand why opening every single attachment they receive is verboten is beyond me.

Being both a CPA and someone who does lightweight programming (mostly scripting via VB, VBA, SQL and some macro languages) and occasional light IT work (setting up computers/routers/small networks, building/repairing computer hardware, etc.), most accountants are, at best, not interested in engaging in real abstract reasoning or learning. I assure you that accounting is really quite simple and there are very few intricacies (except perhaps in the design of their terrible accounting software database which have thousands of tables as a simple report's underlying query could require multiple "union's" for pulling the same type of data...)

I've been doing something very similar to this once I took the plunge into using Gmail.

I only keep the emails that require some action in my inbox and everything goes into an archive folder.

The two secret sauces of my email system are this though:

(1) A series of well written rules to tweak what of a few folders email arrive in such as to tweak my level of attention to the arriving email:
(a) if I'm only on the "cc" it goes into a "cc" folder
(b) if it goes firmwide, it goes to a firmwide folder
(c) if I'm on the "to" it stays in my inbox
(d) if it's one of a series of automated emails, it is automatically sent to archive

(2) http://lookeen.com/ --> the best outlook search tool I've ever used but it requires some understanding of how it works to most effectively use it
(a) you can only search its index and it can't reliably update it index in realtime (I believe as a function of outlook's terrible internal I/O // pst/ost filesystem...)
(b) the speed of lookeen and outlook by extension appear to be related to the degree of fragmentation of the underlying indices and datafiles so I configure lookeen to rebuild its index (2-3 gb of emails takes 10-15 minutes to index on an older computer) and also to selectively defragment both lookeen's database and outlook's files each night

This approach yields lightning quick searches where I'm frequently telling people I work with when I sent them what email over the phone so they look it up the old fashioned way...

I also understand that even if you DO buy an unlocked phone outright in the US, and you go to your carrier to get a plan for it, you still have to go on a contract, and you still have to pay handset repayments as part of the cost of the plan anyway (!?!) (i.e. the plan cost doesn't change if you bring your own handset). It would make me rage uncontrollably if I lived there full time ;)

Not true. I bought my cell phone unlocked with the intent of having a no contract plan. After researching all the cell services, I found out that T-mobile was the only one who actually had a cheaper plan with no contract if you brought your own phone. Guess which company I went with. If this merger had occurred earlier, then I would have been left with no choice.

I'm also aware that T-mobile is the only one to give a cheaper plan, but, while a hassle, I routinely buy and resell phones on my Verizon contract and end up making a return equal to $15-$20/month on my sale (e.g., buying an iphone for 200 an reselling for 600 net of fees yielding 400 over 24 months).

This works especially well with my parents since they don't want smartphones and those phones' discounts are larger since the carrier's phone subsidy is based on a data plan that will never be used.

Usually I'm translating a spreadsheet that's been helpfully locked into .pdf form by another government agency back into a usable spreadsheet, and being able to glance back and forth without sacrificing the full screen view is sanity preserving.

Having done that sort of task before, and typically, en masse in the context of electronic discovery, I strongly recommend a suite a software to assist in that task:

(1) ABBY FineReader 8.0 -- (primarily for scanned spreadsheets) an OCR program, granted an older version, it's the best they ever made and is still available if you ask for it
(2) AbleToExtract -- for documents which have been printed to pdf and don't require OCR
(3) pdf tools command line suite -- useful when dealing with large volumes of pdf's
(4) any pdf password remover -- if you can view a doc, the "edit" password for using the above software (to extract images or content) is usually inherently "crackable"
(5) the newspaper -- good for reading with the all the time you save above instead of getting fired for not having work to do and not looking like you're working anymore

The orb is gone in Office 2010. Microsoft listened to that feedback and changed it.

Good for microsoft, it took them a few years to fix that one

Access is not just a database, but a forms engine. You can't replace Access with Postgre, it's only part of the solution. What people like about access is that it's a single file that you distribute, double click on it and your app runs, including the database. Postgre simply can't do that, even if you use some other forms engine.

Number one, it's called Postgres or PostgreSQL, not Postgre which suggests to me you're either not detail oriented or are not familiar with the actual product. That said, you're right about the forms engine positioning of Access but in reality, virtually all of the "applications" I've seen built in Access are crap and slow. I've intentionally avoided learning Access's VBA because the application is so terrible and having "skills" in it of any substance are nearly worthless. Also, in the consulting world of sorts, I see people all the time tinkering with Access typically producing wrong results or getting odd error messages because of Access's jet engine [intentionally built-in] failings. That said, in very isolated situations where the amount is data is pretty small (typically fewer than 1 million records w/o many sophisticated fields) and it has to be sent to someone who wants to run "their queries" it's acceptable.

Lots of people were constricted by Excel 2007's 64k row limitation. Excel is a useful tool for a lot of people who aren't database experts. You can call them clueless, but they are getting their jobs done just fine with Excel.

I frequently work with these people who allegedly "get their jobs done fine". These are the sort of people who sometimes ask me for help and then I do 1 to 2 weeks worth of their work in 10 minutes of my time while they watch dumbfounded since they are so ridiculously clueless. I've seen people run counts in SQL on massive servers across a wide variety of tables, one at a time. Keep in mind these tables were never indexed because these "individuals" don't understand what indexing is (to Access's credit, it does have some rudimentary indexing which you typically have to manually enable depending on the situation...). As such, these "individuals" spend days just counting records in tables whereas I'll write a script which will index all of the relevant fields and record all of the counts, typically taking a few minutes instead of days...

If you look at your first article, and read all the way to the bottom, you'll find that Office 2007 was slow to execute macros at first, but later hotfixes solved that problem. Office 2010 is also significantly faster.

I saw that too, but wouldn't you say that if their first "upgrade" is actually a downgrade in terms of performance, then the developers didn't have their priorities straight? After all, why should it takes a few hotfixes and a version that comes out ~6 or 7 years later only to get back to where you were?

I can't speak to the VBA argument, but as for the ribbon taking lots of screen space, have you tried minimizing the ribbon? Right click on it and choose "Minimize the Ribbon". You'll suddenly have more screen real-estate than any previous version of Office.

Yes I have, but I'd rather always have something visible which takes up less space than the huge ribbon (I believe every other piece of software has it including 2003, called a toolbar)

In 2003, I have more screen real estate available all the time, a fully customizable toolbar and one click access to lesser used functions on the toolbar. In 2007 to have admittedly slightly more screen real estate, I'd have to maximize the ribbon and potentially navigate to a subribbon of sorts (i.e. at least one extra click if not more)

With a combination of this, keyboard shortcuts (you know those, right?) and the Quick Access Toolbar, you can assign and access all the functions you need easily and without taking up much screen at all.

I know all manner of keyboard shortcuts -- they are not as responsive in 2007 as in 2003 so I have to enter them twice sometimes which sometimes defeats the purpose.

The quick access toolbar is also not very customizable.

Long story short:
(1) I've never met an office user at my level who prefers 2007 or 2010 to 2003
(2) I have no problem if MS or any developer wants to add features, just make it backwards compatible and offer the old interface
(3) Anyone who tries to use Excel's "large data" functionality is clueless and shouldn't be trusted with that much data
(4) Access is admittedly an intentionally crippled version of SQL Server and anyone with such data needs should, in most cases, be using PostgreSQL (that said, on occasion I'll use Access as a dumping ground for big files so clueless users can more easily navigate database extracts...)
(5) What do I call the "Orb" to novice users when I want to describe it to them? "the ball in the upper left"? :)

Okay, let's say it's 50%

The only personal experience I have with this is that, among many other things I do professionally, usually at any organization I'm at (as a consultant or otherwise), I'm embarrassingly the "Excel guru".

Using Excel a moderate amount, I do try to use VBA pretty sparingly given its obvious slowness compared to other methods of calculation, but on occasion, it's markedly more efficient than other designs (e.g. testing for a series of involved conditions which would otherwise process extremely slowly using a formulas, etc.)

I've found that even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 VBA execution, of identical code, is much slower than Excel 2003.

For that reason, along with the sheer inefficiency of the ribbon design in terms of responsiveness and usage of screen real estate, I keep all Office 2007 usage relegated to a VM which I rarely even need.

To further clarify the issue, I have developed a personal library of macros I use in simply navigating spreadsheets efficiently. Even on modern hardware, Excel 2007 cannot keep up with my usage of these macros and throws errors repeatedly whereas I never see such errors in Excel 2003. Keep in mind, this is on modern hardware.

My interpretation of this is that speed and efficiency were low priorities for the Office development team. Given that their interface redesign was, I believe admittedly, largely geared towards novice users, these alleged low priorities make more sense.

To appeal to your sense of empiricism, which I appreciate, please see (perhaps not of the greatest quality...)
http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=81967
http://www.excelbanter.com/showthread.php?t=137875
http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78673&page=1

for what it's worth, I always disable screen refresh and calculation during a macro (except in rare circumstances when that behavior is necessary)

While I agree with your criticism of the parent comment regarding his lack of empiricism, if he were to change his assumption from

Why is it Microsoft Word 97 fits into my 8 megabyte 386 laptop, and has
99%
of the same functions as modern Word, plus is quick and responsive. Why can't they bring that level of efficiency for today's Word 2010?

to

Why is it Microsoft Word 97 fits into my 8 megabyte 386 laptop, and has
75%
of the same functions as modern Word, plus is quick and responsive. Why can't they bring that level of efficiency for today's Word 2010?

It all of a sudden holds more merit

While I'm not claiming to hunt down statistics to prove my point, I think it's safe to say there's absolutely some truth to lazy programming becoming more the norm than the exception in certain areas.

Do you really think some ratio of perceived/available functionality over ram usage has remained constant or significantly decreased?

Don't you hesitate when you're about to download an application for a simple task but the first one you find is, inexplicably, 100 megabtyes, compressed, whereas the 2nd one you find (and download) is 10 or 15? :)

I know I do