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Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jan 12, 2009 08:08 AM
from the mostly-mythical-training-costs dept.
from the mostly-mythical-training-costs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Forrester Research report has found that companies use Microsoft Word for word processing out of habit rather than necessity and are beginning to consider other alternatives as the Web has changed the way people create and share documents. The report, "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story," by analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using Word because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option."
Microsoft surely knows that some other options are creeping slowly into the view of even the most Word-centric users, though. User I dream about smoking writes "Microsoft is testing new capabilities for Office Live Workspace, its online adjunct to Microsoft Office, that will make it a closer rival to online application suites such as Google Docs. Microsoft will start beta testing an updated version of Live Workspace later this year that allows users to create and edit new documents online."
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Submission: Report: Companies using MS Word "out of habit& by Anonymous Coward
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Googles playbook (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I wouldn't trust important documents to stay on the web server. What happens when google goes belly up and starts shutting down their web servers? The bigger a company gets, the bigger they fall.
Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Insightful)
At least when data is stolen off servers I control I know who is to blame.
Employees who leave their workstations unattended and unlocked, or are too lax with their passwords? I doubt the weak link is often the actual administrator in charge of virtual security..
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Insightful)
I doubt the weak link is often the actual administrator in charge of virtual security..
Surely not, but the fact that Google is now hosting business services [google.com], they are quickly becoming the information sink of the universe. They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online. I just don't like all the big brother business, and while I use GMail for personal stuff, I wouldn't start trusting Google with sensitive documents, memos etc.
Web based tools have another huge problem. You're at Google's mercy for upgrades, feature changes etc. Does anyone remember the crap they started with the iGoogle sidebar [informationweek.com]? That sort of stuff quickly discourages corporate clients.
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Insightful)
Good link. I think it just proves that you can't trust the competitors to defend your personal information either.
In the end, no one will defend your important documents more than you will, and that's why I doubt Google Docs will ever gain much market share in the enterprise sector until the day they allow it to be hosted on the intranet (like they do for their corporate search service).
For small businesses it might be an interesting solution though. I think most people don't know much about security in general (not just computers), so hosting things on a Google server might be better than on your spyware ridden home office computer.
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Interesting)
You pretty much summed it up for me too. Aside from security risks, Google has complete control and if something gets changed there isn't much you can do about it. There's also the issue of downtime. After one of the first big RIM/BlackBerry outages, we switched to WinMo devices that connect directly into our Exchange server. Our uptime was better than RIM's last year...kind of pathetic, really. I don't want to put our word processor in the same situation.
Going into the other point of this article, there is another big (maybe the biggest) reason people stick with Word...it's part of the Office *SUITE*. While Word is pretty easily replaced with OO.o Writer, Calc and Impress are not Excel and Powerpoint...they are shy just a few too many features. And if you have Exchange, Outlook is pretty much mandatory. It's cheaper to buy the Office suite than it is to buy Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook separately. So you may as well use Word, since you will have it anyway.
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Insightful)
While what you say is true, what I have been hearing from my SOHO and SMB customers is that they are sticking to older versions, even going so far as to go out and buy more copies of Office 2K3 off the net rather than switch. Why? Because of the damned ribbon! If MSFT wanted to make such a radical change then there should have been the option of going back to the "old style" if the user so chose. Not doing so was a BIG mistake IMHO.
I have customers that have been using MS Office since the days of Office 97, some even earlier. They are so familiar with that interface they can "pop" the icon for what they want without ever even looking up. For users that have that kind of memorization(which I am finding out from OS repair is a LOT of users) switching around the locations of buttons is like a giant STOP sign. I watched it myself with little Velma at the insurance company I do repair and upgrade work for.
Little Velma could be talking at you and "pop" the icons for the features she needed without even looking up. She could crank out business letters and Excel sheets for customers like nobodies business. When I went there to add a printer to their network the owner was fuming how they had been "picked" as part of the pilot program for Office 2K7(they were formally on Office 2K3) and boy was she pissed. She said "You know how fast Velma and Lisa are. Go out there and look!" and sure enough, she was right. Little Velma would type for a little bit and then stop and stare at the screen, trying to figure out which button she wanted. Then when she couldn't find it she would have to call up the help and scroll through that for awhile. Pretty much threw the brakes on her productivity.
So if you want to know what is hurting MSFT, it isn't the competition, it is MSFT. IMHO they have lost their way and are floundering from one idea to the next trying to sustain the '90s growth they enjoyed which frankly ain't never coming back. They went from a company that made boring but usable business software and OSes to this giant multimedia mess that just screams "We can be as hip as Apple and as cool as Google! Yes we can! Quit laughing at me!" which is why my customers are hanging onto XP and Office 2K3 like a starving man hanging onto the last box of Fig Newtons. They need to fire Ballmer, bring back Allchin(and Darth Gates if they have to) and go back to making boring but familiar backwards compatible business OSes. Because mark my words. If they stay on the road that they have been following with Vista and 2K7, and remove the quicklaunch and taskbar for some Apple Dock ripoff, then Win7 will go down just as hard as Vista. Because if you are going to have to learn a new interface and buy all new gear, why not just go ahead and switch to Apple, which lasts longer, or Linux which has many distros with the XP interface?
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online.
Actually, I remember google being the ONLY web search company that stood up to the DOJ when they wanted all search data from a random sampling of users. The DOJ was arguing the constitutionality of some "think of the children" legislation about blocking on the internet...
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Informative)
In many cases even a underpaid, undervalued, overworked EDS 1st line worker can have access to very sensitive data on the customers servers and PC's. I certainly did back in the days when I worked/slaved for them.
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Insightful)
You DO realize that you just gave the "If you have nothing to hide" speech, don't you? Which is of course exactly what has become wrong with the USA and most of the west. There is a good reason why we must reject that argument and fight those that would implement it in government. Simply: power corrupts. There is a good reason why that phrase is so old and is yet used so frequently. Because it is a universal truth. Water is wet, the sky is blue, and power corrupts.
We have already had 8 years of abuse of power here in the USA, and closer to 30 years of corrupt laws that were obviously written by "he who wrote the biggest check". So if you don't mind all my data will be kept where I can encrypt it however I want. And considering the wholesale wiretapping [washingtonpost.com] and the risk of state sponsored industrial espionage [wikipedia.org] IMHO you'd have to be really crazy or really naive to just leave your data where anyone outside your company can get at it.
And what about liability? Do they have a monetary guarantee to cover your losses if THEY get hacked and all your data gets handed to your competitor, thereby giving them your plans for the next 5 years? If YOU are in control of the data you can set security policy, limit who has access to which data, etc. But by passing it to "the cloud" you frankly have NO clue who has access to your data or if they are disgruntled and looking to make some cash on the way out. No thanks, doesn't sound too appealing to me. It just isn't worth the risks to me for a free doc editor and online collaboration.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
While the Google Docs suite is pretty limited, I managed to stay on it and a few other odd web services exclusively for thirty days without many problems. It just takes some (pretty serious) change in your work-flow. There are also some real advantages over local work. The OS is Dead [blogspot.com].
Re:Googles playbook (Score:5, Insightful)
It just takes some (pretty serious) change in your work-flow.
Ding ding!
It required you, someone who we can safely assume is fairly techie (or you wouldn't be posting to /.) to make some serious changes in your work-flow.
Multiply those changes by everyone in the organisation and throw in re-building existing business process which expect Word documents and you now know how come it takes something pretty huge to make an organisation radically change the day to day operations of their business.
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Server issues (Score:4, Insightful)
On the whole subject of collaborative document editing, I think this is the real kicker. Many companies block Google's tools since that would mean storing company info outside of the company. Add to this the "beta" caveat that Google carries, and Google no longer considers itself liable if competitors get access to the info. After all, they did tell you it was buggy and all...
Are we really moving back to a server/terminal mentality? More importantly, is it a good thing that we are adding traffic to do tasks that were done with local media? I think corporations like the idea of collaborative editing, but they would prefer it of everything stayed behind their firewalls and on their own server's drives.
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
Personally I wouldn't trust important documents to stay on the web server. What happens when google goes belly up and starts shutting down their web servers?
You are aware that all Google Docs can be backed up locally with Google Gears and also converted into a number of popular formats?
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Googles playbook (Score:4, Informative)
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I use Microsoft to fight the evil G$$Gle empire (Score:5, Funny)
I am against huge monopolies controlling everything we do on our computers with their close sourced spy crapware. Down with the G$$G-borg! Fight for Microsoft! Up with freedom!
Microsoft Word is an amazingly innovative and capable program. It does everything I need with an intuitive interface that even your grandmother could use, but is l33t enough for the geekiest power user. Plus, it's free! All power to Microsoft, fight the evil corporate empires!!!!
Re:I use Microsoft to fight the evil G$$Gle empire (Score:5, Funny)
And when did it's interface become intuitive?
Press a key on the keyboard and a similarly shaped glyph appears on the screen. That's pretty intuitive. It's also about as far as most people make it.
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Wow (Score:5, Funny)
analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using [insert-any-application-here] because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option
What an amazing insight! Who would have suspected such a thing?
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
I work for a large international IT research firm and I just comb Slashdot, filtering for only +5 comments, and then plagiarize what I see and put it in my report.
The sucky part is, when I first started, I forgot to filter out the "+5 Funny" comments. So, in my reports, you'd see "In Soviet Russia, Ms Word You!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of MS Word" and so on. I got fired from my first job. But I got it down now.
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I have never liked word. (Score:5, Funny)
I always feel I am fighting it to get it to do what I want. If I wanted to fight computers, I would buy computer games.
Re:I have never liked word. (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently it's not just Word. I've been having that experience with Windows 7 since the beta was released. I installed it in VirtualBox and have spent the last two days trying to find a way to:
I also despise the Ribbon the more I work with it. Luckily my work hasn't upgraded to the latest Office yet and are still using Office 2003.
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Moving to online Office may kill Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
The first time the file serving cloud takes a nosedive, everyone will scream and run away.
Sure, Microsoft already eats files on a regular basis, but not in a coordinated mini-apocalypse.
And yes, Google Docs could do(has done) that too, but people aren't yet using it on the same scale. (Plus it is in beta, ha-ha, not their fault)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Strangely, my paid-for Google Docs account doesn't say "Beta" anywhere. I guess it must be only the free version that's beta. Shock! No other company does that. ::rollseyes::
How hard can it be to switch? (Score:5, Insightful)
How hard can it be to switch? This post will neither debate the advantages or disadvantages of word or wordprocessors. Just the latter... of users.
Having recently had to interact with the "real world" and wordprocessor documents, I must say that I was astounded at the quality of output of wordprocessors. The main problem is that even technically capable people seem to refuse outright to make any effort to actually learn how to use a tool that they spend hours per day sitting in front of. They treat a wordprocessor as a typewriter with font effects and images.
People still can't embed images properly. Either they're linked to some program which noone else has or a bitmap of a vector drawing so noone else can edit them. People still refuse to make even the most basic use of styles or cross referencing. It is absolutely astounding.
People will happily put in HOURS per document on a daily basis, fiddlind around with font dialogs, instead of spending 1 our learning how to use styles, for instance.
How hard can it be to switch? Users would go from not knowing how to use word to not knowing how to use openoffice.
But it really does amaze me how people can use the same tool all day, every day for weeks at a time, or even more and still not know many of the most basic features. Sure people want to "get work done", but that is best achieved by becoming an expert in the tools of the trade. When was the last time you heard a carpenter refusing to learn how to use a power saw because he "needed to get work done"?
BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Sore spot with me. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is timely in that I just had a 'run-in' of sorts regarding MS Word usage and its consideration as a standard. My son is in sixth grade and, of course, has to write about 2 papers a month in his English class. He had his first official type-written paper this past couple of weeks and since we have no Windows computers and no MS Office/Word at home (all Linux, Solaris and Mac OS), we could not comply with the teacher's requirement for using MS Word with a Times New Roman font. Instead I had my son use Google Documents (which is what he's used since he started typing papers of any sort) with a Verdana font. He ended up receiving a D on the paper for not following instructions. The school has a computer lab, with Windows and MS Office, but that lab is only available to him during his assigned lab hours or after school. If he wants to use it after school, I have to pay for "After School Care" program. This kind of nonsense infuriates me. It's as if he can only write a reasonable paper if done so using MS products. Anyway, I just wrote the teacher last evening regarding coming to an agreement on things so that he doesn't suffer due to the school's devotion to MS products (a recent change as the entire school used to be Linux/OOo/etc.).
Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
Now, if the students were submitting something for publication (some in-school publication that would not require electronic submission), I can see violating exact formatting specifications being a disqualifier, but that should be handled seperately than any grading that should be examining the student's writing, logic, grammar, and syntax, with only a fraction of points hinging on format.
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Forced MS Usage Is Economic Discrimination (Score:4, Insightful)
Mandating use of Word or any other commercial product for homework seems to me a form of economic discrimination. Lots of families still can't afford a PC, much less Office.
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Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't Open Office support .doc files and Times New Roman font?
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Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Sore spot with me. (Score:4, Informative)
The point being why should he be required to go out and purchase a $500 Office suite to comply with a sixth-grade teacher's demands?
What if he didn't have MacOS in the house, only Linux?
As long as the paper meets the content & formatting requirements, the application used to create it should be irrelevant to the teacher. Marking a kid all the way down to a D just for having the wrong font used is petty.
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Excel (Score:4, Interesting)
Although this might seem an unfair blow, trying to replace Word is probably considerably less important than trying to replace Excel. In finance, for example, everyone uses Excel out of habit (and due to a lack of a good replacement, too), but in many cases because replacements do not support the add-ons they are used to (e.g. Bloomberg add-ons), without which many would be useless.
This is the exact same type of hurdle that Linux faces with support for hardware. Companies don't want to support it, and it's taken a really long time to write drivers. If Excel is replaced with a good alternative, I think Word would easily follow, even if the interface were radically different.
Just a thought
The MS Office Habit (Score:4, Insightful)
Excel is a much bigger issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Word is mostly used for churning out throwaway documents. Excel is used for long term storage of data - and there's a _lot_ of VBA code out there pulling data out of ancient spreadsheets.
Re:The way I write (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a video explanation of why you shouldn't e-mail documents [youtube.com]. I completely agree with it. Creating twenty-five copies of the same document at various revisions is an error-prone habit.
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Re:File Compatibility, not Habit (Score:5, Informative)
Shee-yit, Word isn't 100% compatbile with Word documents ! I frequently need to 'repair' Word 2007 documents before I can re-open them. This of course begs the question, if Word can repair it, why doesn't it just open it ? This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Re:File Compatibility, not Habit (Score:5, Interesting)
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Somebody has to do it. (Score:4, Informative)
Go ahead, mod me offtopic, but somebody has to do it. http://begthequestion.info/ [begthequestion.info]
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Re:File Compatibility, not Habit (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they aren't compatible, they're not serious competition.
If they aren't compatible? Do you mean "if OOo is 0% compatible" or "if OOo is not 100% compatible" as there is a rather large difference between the two. Saying that you must be either 100% compatible or 0% seems like a false dichotomy.
It seems to me if it were an acceptable level of compatible (say 99/100 documents) that might be serious competition depending on the company.
Re:File Compatibility, not Habit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:MS Office has been online for years (Score:5, Insightful)
And it doesn't work very well. We're always playing musical chairs with documents whether they're on a sharepoint or file share.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Microsoft Office (especially Powerpoint, but also Excel and Word) are "better" than Open Office. There are readily available training materials. In fact, if you've got certain classes of Microsoft licensing, you can get the on-demand online training for your entire organization for next to nothing. And the integrations with 3rd party applications are a key feature. It doesn't matter if Open Office does 95% of what Microsoft Office does, if those key connectors that important departments or divisio
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
its faster to teach someone to use a specific program then to teach someone a generic way of thinking that can be applied again and again...
think of the modern education system as programming biological robots and one get a nice mental image of what both government and big biz wants us to be...
Re:Of course its out of habit (Score:5, Interesting)
I found that recompiling OO.o (it's a major BITCH! to do BTW)
and changing things to say "word" and "excel" and the icons... in other words faking it to be the office suite was enough to fool a large swath of the office to believe they were using microsoft word and excel. just a different "version". we called it a service pack upgrade and swallowed it whole.
It's mostly physiological with users. The same thing happens when you IE skin Firefox.
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Re:Next up: (Score:5, Interesting)
What Obama should do is mandate the use of open standards on certified systems. Let state and local governments figure out the cheapest way to implement such a standard. Really, it is irrelevant whether or not the government uses a free software operating system, as long as government documents are not in a proprietary format and as long as the government is not wasting money paying for its software (proprietary or free). What is needed is easier communication between different government departments and between the government and the people; the operating system that is used is not as important, as long as an open standard is in use.
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Re:Next up: (Score:4, Insightful)
That is a HUGE number of conversions to be doing with a GUI based program. I do not know what your workflow is, but it sounds like you really need to be invoking ghostscript through some sort of shell script, or maybe in a Perl or AWK program. It is possible that you will actually see efficiency improvements, as this approach may allow for greater automation. As I said, I do not know your workflow, but this really sounds like a case where a little bit of shell scripting can go a long way.
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