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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Wednesday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 05/26/2010 Microsoft’s already
introduced Office 2010 and I’m still learning Office 2007 ... One of
the many things you need to understand about the PC industry when it comes to
software is that newer is not better. Just because a vendor introduces a new
version of their software - that isn’t a reason to run like lemmings to
the newest version. Often the vendor does an update of their software either
as a benefit to them – meaning it will be easier for then to maintain
or create new applications - or to keep up with the software Joneses –
other vendors have come up with software updates and your vendor is just
trying to keep up. I can
remember working with the first version of Microsoft Word around 1990. At the time there were two other word
processing programs that had the larger market share – Word Star and
Word Perfect. And I remember
reading an article at the time that the majority of people who used word
processing programs only used about 1 percent of the programs capability. In
other words, people learned to their own level of comfort and functionality,
and gave up learning anything further. That meant that in a word processing
program of the time – which had several hundred possible capabilities
– most people learned 7: 1 Open a file 2 Type and create the file 3 run a spell check on words in the
file (grammar checkers hadn’t happened yet) 4 Format words in the document
– bold, italic, etc. 5 Format the file – change
the margins 6 Save the file 7 Print the file And I’ll bet you today that
most people still only know these 7 basic functions in word processing
– plus the required 8th function now of knowing how to send the
document as an email – despite the fact that today’s program have
thousands of capabilities – all sitting there – unused. The only
exception I have personally found to this “rule of 7” has been
working with the legal profession, and there many of the secretaries really
use many more of the available functions. So as a
business owner who pays the bills, or as just a computer user at home, your
question for any software program upgrade should be “What is the
increased profitability or productivity to me of this software upgrade ?”
And in many cases you might have a hard time justifying the upgrade,
which is why today probably most business users are running Office and Word
2003 rather than Office 2007, and these people will take a skeptical look at
Office 2010. As I look at Office 2010 information on the web on
Microsoft and other sites, what jumps out at me is all the hype about Office Web Apps: Store, edit, and share documents online.
So what a lot of what this Microsoft Office 2010 upgrade
is really all about is the concept of Cloud Computing, which
I’ve talked about previously on Raw Bytes.
Google is the giant in
Cloud Computing – the concept that you
don’t need to buy an office software suite or have in-house computers
or a support staff –
because you can do the same thing online with Google’s
Business Applications.
So the question is this – is Office 2010 a
new and exciting suite of applications with new functionality worth its price
– or is it a Microsoft defensive move against Google, which
you’re going to help finance ?
Next week – frustrations
with upgrading to Office 2007.
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For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2009 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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