Companies Using MS Word "Out of Habit," Says Forrester

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."

The way I write

[Threni]

I'd like to confirm that the internet has not changed the way I write word documents. It's still a mouse and keyboard for me. I don't tend to share documents that much - I email them and that's that. I'd imagine this is true of most Word users, or at least, most Word documents.

Explains why

[nawcom]

It sort of explains why a good amount of people rated Office 2007 badly [amazon.com]. It was breaking there habit!!!!!! Who would dare to do such thing? I use preloaded OpenOffice.org myself. For many people though, they think, "why try something different when... you don't have to?" People still browse with IE6 for this exact reason.

What's the point of this post? I'm simply saying the article speaks the truth.

Re:Googles playbook

[Daengbo]

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].

Moving to online Office may kill Microsoft

[Zerth]

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:File Compatibility, not Habit

[deniable]

That's an improvement. In previous versions, I had to use OpenOffice to 'repair' documents that Word couldn't open. And yeah, different versions or even changing printers can make Word documents go flaky. (Of course, people not tweaking every little formatting parameter would make that less of a problem.)

Re:Googles playbook

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Have to agree! It surprises me given that Google do (or did) sell application servers for search, they didn't do the same with their Apps suite; I'm sure loads of corporates would be happy to purchase their own box with support.

Re:Server issues

[Daengbo]

I'm really pretty tired of the "Beta" card sysadmins keep pulling out WRT Google. I demand a link that proves that the corporate version (i.e. the paid-for version) of Google Docs is a beta. I have looked. I haven't found it. You apparently know something that I don't. Pony up the proof.

BS

[gx5000]

We will not be going on net for document creation... Get your heads out of the clouds and back to ground. The mere thought of being reliant on resources out of our control is insanity. The Bandwidth issue not withstanding, security and infrastructure concerns aside, this is folly and is meant to drive another INTERNET bubble of fools looking for the next big tech movement. Let's start talking about how better to organize what we have instead of watching repeats of William Shatner's Techwar ok ? Cripes.

Re:Of course its out of habit

[Lumpy]

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.

Sore spot with me.

[rindeee]

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.).

Excel

[dollargonzo]

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

Re:Next up:

[betterunixthanunix]

1. Ubuntu? Thanks, but I'll take a certified system like RHEL, SLES, or Solaris for government work. The certifications do actually represent something, even though I am sure a dozen or so slashdotters will have stories about some certified system being compromised (responses to compromise are part of the certification) or some non-certified system never being compromised (possible, nobody even denied this could happen).
2. FREE does not mean "zero dollars." A switch to Ubuntu would be pricey, and while it is likely to save money in the long run, the up front cost is a factor and is likely higher than the yearly cost of running the various other systems the US government uses. My state is facing a budget crisis, I really don't think we need a mandate to switch to Ubuntu on the table when we are already looking at cutting funding for schools in the best case scenario.
3. Judging by the quality of code I see out of my own classmates, at one of the top 50 universities in the US, I do not think I am very comfortable with the idea of government systems being run by college students. Canonical has not really demonstrated that they employ top notch programmers either, and beyond that, Canonical is not an American company (they are registered on the Isle of Man), so they are not in a position to deal with sensitive government systems. We have enough problems with government systems, let's not compound it.

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.

Re:The MS Office Habit

[PuppeteerJPV]

*shrug* I find that i'm able to do things much quicker and intuitively with the Ribbon once I got used to using it.

I've talked to other long-time (10+ years) office users who think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

It's all subjective. Personally, i'd never sacrifice usability and feature-set by going to OpenOffice when Office is a choice.

Anytime i've tried to use Openoffice, i've been frustrated as I routinely put together sales documents and Office can make them look professionally-made very quickly.

Re:Googles playbook

[Kamokazi]

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.

Re:Googles playbook

[Ice Tiger]

I just read your blog on your experiment and one of the most striking things I noticed about online vs local install was the incredible pace of innovation. The feeling I got was that whilst living online is probably just about doable now, in a year or two local installs might seem quaint.

When online application release cycles are measured in days vs years for typical Microsoft applications then the sense of being left behind could become a factor moving away from desktop apps.

Re:Googles playbook

[Herschel Cohen]

RE: wasn't there some incident where they gave up Chinese dissidents to the Chinese government?

True, but use Yahoo in your search in place of Google. [By the way they still do not see anything wrong with their role in the prosecution of this case. A few links are provided to jog your memory.]

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/tech/news/article_1373666.php [monstersandcritics.com]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/10/16/yahoo.congress/index.html [cnn.com]

http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2007/07/shi-taos-case-y.html [blogs.com]