sootman's Journal: Yet Another Supposed Office Killer

Another day, another office suite that will supposedly, once again, "replaced [sic] the... incredibly bloated and slow MS Office."

OK, here's the deal. It will be ages, if ever, before an office suite even makes a dent in MS's offering. I like OOo as much as the next slashdot reader, but you have to know that for every friend, relative, and small business you convince to use an alternative, there are a thousand companies, with a thousand seats each, that have bought and will continue to buy MS Office. Keynote might be making a dent in PowerPoint, but those files are much more likely than Word documents or spreadsheets to be kept to oneself. However, the ability to share Word docs and spreadsheets is essential. Businesses using these apps need to be able to open, change, save, and send without any custom settings. Period. There's an old quote: "GM isn't in the business of making cars. GM is in the business of making money." Similarly, a business is not in the business of learning how software works. A business uses software as one of its many tools it has to make money. If they need to learn more about the software to get things done, fine, but they'd rather not. The software they can use with the least learning, wins.

No one wants to hear about saving as HTML or RTF. No one wants to hear about "vendor lock-in" or all the other good reasons NOT to use Word. Businesses want to a) open all their existing documents and b) continue doing what they're doing.

Remeber in the old days the saying was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Now it's the same with MS. We all know business reality is ugly and non-ideal but the sooner you accept that business reality is reality, as far as businesses are concerned, the better off you'll be. Imagine these two conversations:

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because he has a different version of Word than you have."
Boss: "Oh. Stupid Microsoft. Can you fix it?"

or

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as .DOC or .RTF or export to .PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.

It is possible (or was, once upon a time) to unseat the reigning king, but the chances of that happening again are unlikely. At best, it'll happen in another 5-10 years. This article is an excellent story but it's worth remembering that a) file formats are several orders of magnitude more complex now and b) there are several orders of magnitude more Excel users today than there were Lotus 1-2-3 users back then. And as for point A, it is, of course, in MS's interest to keep changing the format--whether it's so they can add new features or just to screw competing developers really doesn't matter. The reality is they have and will continue to do so.

Aside: When I first played with the professional version of Acrobat, which will let you actually edit text, I thought right away that Adobe had a better chance of killing Word than anyone else. They could have made a word processor--even one as simple as MS's WordPad--with PDF as its native format. They could have sold this for $50-100 (instead of screwing around with Acrobat Business Tools) and made a mint and would have made a huge dent in the number of .DOC files out there. If they would have combined with OO or StarOffice or AppleWorks or AbiWord or whatever and had a really powerful $150-250 word cruncher, they would have knocked Word off the block instantly.

Think about it--you could make documents that by default (key point there) would be readable on every platform with Acrobat Reader (or something similar) which everyone already has ('nuther key point there). Everyone already knows what a PDF is. (Ask the average man on the street--hell, as the average slashdotter--what SXW is and most won't know. Hell, even God^Hogle says "Did you mean: swf.") For a mere $50 (or whatever), the recipient could edit the document as well, and for, say, $200, they'd have all the power of tables, revisions, authors, etc. "Office" would be no more--people would have Adobe's word processor and Excel. Bam, half the battle won, and as a bonus, Adobe would be more suited to the moniker "The Document Company" than Xerox. But anyway, we're getting off track here. Adobe won't be making a word processor anytime soon.

Yes, Mac OS X can make PDFs from any application that can print. Yes, you can make PDFs for free in Windows. Yes, OOo has built-in one-click PDF support. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that all OOo docs are just gzipped XML and your data can never, ever be lost or unreadable. Doesn't matter that IBM likes it. Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world. Office won't be unseated anytime soon.

(And the thought that an Apple product will kill Office? Puh-lease. Even if every Mac user dropped Office overnight, that's less than 5% of the document-making world. And just like Safari and IE, MS would kill Office for Mac and bam! there goes the ability to keep Macs in the enterprise. I love Apple, but it ain't gonna happen.)