A New Version of MS Office Every 90 Days 292
Billly Gates writes "It appears Microsoft is following Chrome's agile development model like Mozilla did. At a recent tech conference, Kurt DelBene, president of the Office division, said they have mechanisms in place to update Office on a quarterly basis. Of course to get these new wondrous features and bugfixes you have to have a subscription to Office 365. Are the customers who most prefer subscriptions (corporate) going to want new things in the enterprise every 90 days? It is frustrating to see so many of them still on IE 7, XP, and Office 2003, which hurts Windows and Office sales and holds back innovation. At the same time, the accountants notice significant savings by keeping I.T. costs down with decade/semi decade updates to their images, while I.T. only puts out fires in between. Will this bring change to that way of doing things, or will Microsoft's cloud offerings with outsourced Exchange and Sharepoint make up for it using cost savings and continually updated software in the enterprise?"
Yup. That's exactly what companies want. (Score:4, Informative)
Last place I worked upgraded from Office 2003 in 2011. And that was mostly because some of our clients were making snarky comments about our ancient software. The absolute last thing a corporation wants is software that is constantly changing. Every minor change throws the oldsters (generally anyone 5 years younger than me and up) into a tizzy because the rote memorization they used to "learn" the old version doesn't work any more.
Re:Changing the "every other version sucks" model? (Score:0, Informative)
before they totally messed up the interface with their "ribbon bar" or whatever they called it
Are people still crying about this? The rest of us spent a few days finding the stuff we use, which is not hard since now it's categorized, and went on with our lives.
Re:Crying unto the children... (Score:3, Informative)
> 3. Integration with SQL and business intelligence reports in Excel
You just lost the "average user" at that point.
Although you probably lost them already at #1 or or #2.
#4 is just a lie. #9 is esoteric even for companies. #10 is just a big security nuissance.
Re:Chrome's agile development? (Score:2, Informative)
Which is NOT what either Enterprise or end users really want. Chrome is a new and shiny toy, and the hype will fall the moment it needs to be depended upon, just like with Apple products.
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
Even worse: You lose it.