I'm personally looking forward to Office Online and Office 14. That's not because I had a brain washing chip installed when I applied to work for Microsoft; I'm free to install whatever I like on my home computer and I personally like Office.

I've been using Office for years (even when I applied for a job with Google!) and think it's a brilliant set of programs. However, there are circumstances when I can see the benefits of an online platform. I've used Google Docs a few times in the past and would have loved for there to have been an Office equivalent I could have used then.

So I will be eagerly awaiting the news of when I'm allowed to play with the beta because I think this is a great step foward.

@Jess Meats:
Yes but you cant really say anything bad about office anyway or your likely to end up unemployed. I said i didnt like windows vista and was fired a fortnight later for other various offences as made up by my superior. And by the way it wasnt microsoft i was working for it was a reseller, so see how the whole ecosystem is pretty stupid. If you vent an opinion your dead in the water.

So you work for microsoft , so you cant have any other opinion other than the company line or you too will be out. Good Luck .

@kittylitty
I suppose it's down to situation. If I went out to a big customer who my superiors were hoping would buy a gazzilion Office licenses and said, "Office sucks," I'd probably get in trouble. If, around the workplace, I said, "there's this little feature of Office I don't quite like," I'd probably get asked to write out a detailed description of what the problem was and why, so that the development team would have constructive feedback to help make the next version.

I think it's always better to be honest about a product. If you admit the weaknesses as well as praise the strengths, people are going to get what they expect.

There's an anology I quite like: selling skis in the desert. If you are trying to sell the perfect pair of skis to a guy in the middle of a desert, it won't matter how good the skis are, the person is going to think they're useless. If you know where the software is appropriate and where it's not, the right people use it for the task it was designed for.

I'm never going to say that everyone in the world would benefit from Office. I just know that it's a great program and that there are plenty of people who could get enormous benefit from it. If they buy it, brilliant! I'm not going to try and sell it to someone who'd have absolutely no use for it.

Ok Jess, firstly thanks for your honesty (unlike some posters who fly the MS flag) Lets see how "free" your speech really is. I put these questions to a MS shill, and they refused to answer. Lets see if you are really "free to speak"
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A student/home user wants an office suite. They just need the basics and are short on cash (but can afford MS office) Would you recommend they get MS Office or Open Office?
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And what does MS office offer to the home user (and indeed business user) that justifies the price, when Open Office is free? How is MS office better for the average user?
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I look forward to more of your honesty.

If I can add as well.

Would you say then, as an MS employee, you dont mind the fact that Open Office had over 3 million downloads and according to PC World, 80% of them were Windows users.

It would be nice for an honest MS comment on that as well as my above questions.

Regards.

Too bad that insightless stupidees can ask 1000x more questions than the greatest brains in the MS hemisphere can answer.

I think your username gives us a clue to your mentality.
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If after Jess's two long posts saying not much, she cant answer my questions, then its a bad show.
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Is there any great brains in the MS hemisphere? You mean Ballmer? lol. Or do you mean someone else?
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and where have these great brains been whilst MS's customer base and image are being eroded away?

@Goblin
I didn't reply sooner because it was the weekend and I went to see my sister. It has nothing to do with Microsoft clamping down on free speech or me not being able to answer your questions.

I think people should see what suits them best. I prefer MS Office from a user interface perspective. I think it's nicer and easier to use, but I accept that that might not be enough for everyone. I would personally always go for MS Office over Open Office, despite the price, even on a home computer. For a home user, it depends how basic their basic usage is. If all they want is the bare essentials then feature wise, OpenOffice probably gives them what they need, HOWEVER, I still think MS Office is nicer to use. My suggestion would be for them to try out both options and see which they like better. It's done to personal choice.

For a business case, there are a huge number of reasons why MS Office is better. An email program that is designed out of the box to work with the rest of the Office package is the first and most obvious reason (not even Google use Gmail for business email!). MS Office has document sharing capabilities built-in, is fully managed, is easier and cheaper to deploy (there are case studies of this), it has more support and it integrates with LOB applications. On top of that it has a specially designed forms program; OpenOffice has no equivalent program to InfoPath. It has workflow support. It's quicker for doing things like mail merges (I saw a report detailing the process saying that it was five times faster - and that was done by someone who understand data connections, a non-techy person would probably take even longer in OpenOffice). Is that enough reasons to be going on with? MS Office is an incredibly valuable tool for businesses. I think it's a case of getting what you pay for. If a business goes for OpenOffice, they'll probably pay more in the long run in terms of inefficiency, integration, maintance and so on.

As an MS employee, I'm at the bottom rung of the ladder. I don't know much about market share or percentages.

All I know is that I'm one of those 3 million downloads and I'm running Windows. I downloaded OpenOffice, tried out using it for a few days, wrote up a brief comparison (not for this comment - by actual comparison is about 4 pages long) and uninstalled it. Just because people have downloaded it doesn't mean they're using it. I don't think it would be easy to estimate how many have downloaded it to try it out and then decided to pay for MS Office.

I'm fine with people trying out OpenOffice because I honestly believe MS Office is a nice program to use.

Thanks firstly for responding. An MS employee who encourages users to try alternatives and find the best suited? Wow. Andre? You listening?
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Then I had a think, home users are not really a large portion of the profit for MS are they? and I noticed that the same recommendation was not made to business users. Why cant they try Open Office aswell?
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There are many topics which I make comments on as a result of my own research. I always make this very clear, however, I can say from personal experience I challenge the cost effectiveness of MS Office. Our firm has recently replaced MS office with Open Office. There was a small amount of training required for its different nuances, however it was astronomically cheaper than purchasing MSoffice. Id love to see your costing or even a link which "proves" all switches to Open Office are more costly than MS licenses.
Its funny you should mention the maintenance of Open Office, as I fail to see where that would occur, however if we switch for a minute to your products, how much money do you think has been spent, protecting, cleaning and computer downtime with MS software? I think you'll find it considerably more.
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Right, lets get onto more of your comments. You claim that theres no open source version of InfoPath. Well you worded that quiet cleverly, but you know as well as I do OpenMRS is the alternative.
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Next up "I think it's a case of getting what you pay for." - Really? I paid for Vista, suffered with it and then found an excellent OS with Linux. Check out other users opinions of that theory. I think you'll find they differ to yours. The other comments you make a supposition, how do you know how long it will take a non-techy person to do anything in Open Office? and your comments about speed are a little rich from an employee of a firm that has been hit by bad PR about EXACTLY the same issue.
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You said "All I know is that I'm one of those 3 million downloads and I'm running Windows. I downloaded OpenOffice, tried out using it for a few days, wrote up a brief comparison (not for this comment - by actual comparison is about 4 pages long) and uninstalled it"
I say: Well MS claim their Vista figures on the basis of what was pre-installed on the machines sold, not if people scrubbed it and installed Linux or downgraded. If MS is allowed to make these types of claims, why cant I?
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I challenge you to find a "traditional" company that needs the features that you have described as being the justification for the price. I think you'll find the majority of business want are the "basic" traditional features that Open Office can provide and for free. It doesnt matter if you run windows or Linux or even Mac.
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There are so many schemes and products in the MS range, that do just about everything for you. Its just a shame that whilst MS were putting their fingers in so many pies, they have seemed to miss the fact that there are free alternatives offering exactly the same thing. Users are becoming more aware, and this can be seen purely by the amount of disgruntled people with MS products on ANY tech forum/blog/newsgroup. I dont need to argue that point, its so obvious after even a quick search.

I'm not saying MS Office is perfect for everyone. I just think it's a great system for most businesses. If your company honestly had no reduction in efficiency, then I can't argue with your personal experience IN THIS CASE. But just as I can't claim that the MS plan would be perfect for everyone, you can't claim that your implementation would be perfect for everyone. Out of interest, how many computer users are in your company? How much do those users use document sharing and colaboration?

You brought up Vista but I'm not going to get into an arguement about that. I'm running Vista and perfectly happy with it, but I'm not going to try and argue you over to my point of view. We'd probably be here until Windows gazillion comes out still arguing!

The comment I made about the speed of a mail merge was from a blog post where someone had tried to do exactly the same task in the two systems. He'd practiced both beforehand so he knew exactly which buttons to press so it wasn't a case of being more familiar with MS Office. It took him five times as long to do a mail merge in Open Office - and that's a very common business task. My supposition that a non-techy person would take longer came from looking at the steps required in Open Office and reading the comments in the blog - including a couple of people saying that they couldn't figure out how to do mail merges, even checking the help.

I don't suggest that business users try out all the alternatives, because the suggestions are unfeasible. Consider all the alternatives, maybe. But if they were to do a company-wide implementation of Open Office to try for a few days, then a company-wide implementation of MS Office to try for a few days, then a... you get the point. Installing a program on a single computer and trying it for the tasks you intend to use it for is a simple matter. Doing the same thing for a large (probably even a small) business would require installing it on all machines, getting users skilled up, getting them to use it for their jobs and see what the capabilities are. On anything but a company with a very, very small number of computer users, trying out two or three different systems would enormously increase the time and probably money involved. A single person can have an experiment with MS Office on a friend's computer. A company can't really do that.

Why do you assume I know what OpenMRS is? I hadn't heard of it. I'm not an expert in MS Office. I'm not an expert in the competing software. I just happen to use and like Office. All I know is that when I went to the Open Office website and downloaded the package, there was no equivalent to InfoPath. I've now done a quick search. It's a program for customised medical records system. I wouldn't have said that looks like InfoPath at all. There's certainly nothing in the Open Office package I downloaded that does what InfoPath does.

Having done various temp jobs which involved filling out forms, data entry from forms, figuring out what to do when people filled out forms badly, I can say that I know that there is significant business value in InfoPath. In one of my jobs, if the forms had just been able to pre-populate data (just one of the things InfoPath does out of the box with no coding) I could have worked part time, filled out the same number of forms, and probably still had much more time to do other tasks. Given the number of forms a lot of companies use, a program that allows people to write complex forms (without any technical knowledge) that can prepopulate based on entered values or even the user's ID, validate, perform complex functions, bring data from databases, send it straight to databases, email it to the correct person, have different views for different people/permissions, have tables where you can add rows or columns as needed, have sections that can be repeated as needed, have hidden sections and condition formatting, and loads more, is very useful. I can see business value in InfoPath alone, let alone the rest of MS Office, for any company that uses forms. And I think a huge number do use forms for expenses claims, holiday booking, work requests, customer orders and so on.

I'm curious as to how you define a "traditional" company. Most companies these days operate in a different way to they way they did a few decades ago. A huge amount of companies now have almost as many computers as they do staff. "Traditional" to me means something that's been going for a while. If there are companies that operate today exactly the way they did twenty or thirty years ago, they probably don't have enough computers for the quesiton to be relevant.

Most companies need an email program. Outlook is easy to use, has an excellent calendar function, as well as contacts and tasks. Yes there are free email programs, but they're not part of the Open Office package. I'm less of an expert on email programs than I am on Office, but in a choice between Outlook and Mozilla Thundrebird (which I used for over a year) I would choose Outlook every time.

I think the document sharing capabilities are of huge business value to medium to large companies.

And I still believe MS Office is nicer to use. People are more likely to get the most out of whatever software they use if they like the program.

As I said, I'm not an Office expert. I've been with Microsoft all of two months, so I haven't gone through an implementation of Office for a company and seen how easy/hard or cheap/expensive it is. I'm defending Office because I happen to like it and personally think it's a great program, not becuase it's part of my job description. You appear to be arguing with me as though I were knowledgeable in all things Office. I'm really not. There are probably over a dozen people in the same room as me who have more experience of implementing it in big businesses than I do.

I started commenting in this thread just to say that I liked using Office and was looking forward to using the online version. I wasn't intending to get into a full scale debate over the business value and I think I may be getting a little out of my depth.

Again, thanks for your reply. I will say that I respect the position you are coming from, and at least we have "our cards on the table" so that people know exactly which side of the fence each of us fall on.
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Ill answer your Q's: 31 users requiring an Office suite. Now whilst I know that figure makes us a small customer in the eyes of MS,I look at our own requirements and compare us to others and see there is no real difference. I wouldnt think many businesses require the features you have mentioned, and whilst the same could not be said for a very large body such as government, I think you will find in recent months 4 governments switching to open source in the mainstream, so it appears there are others who share my opinion.
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It puzzles me when MS mentions how good Outlook at its email programs are. Ive used them for years and appart from a few asthetical differences I have not seen the difference between them and Evolution that I currently use. I dont think the MS office range is bad, and would be tempted to agree when you use the word "nice" however our views part when it comes to costing and the price for the average user.
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Traditional companies in my view are ones that operate with departments/secretaries/operators that do not require information/document sharing. They require office tools and a printing facility. All these fancy features MS offers are great Im sure, but how many people actually require them?
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"I think I may be getting a little out of my depth." - Not at all, you are entitled to your opinion, you have been open about your background, and have been the first to admit the limitations of your experience. (You listening Andre?) I dont call myself anywhere near up to the standard of experience of some people here in regards to MSoffice and its associated tools. On here I come from a personal view and what I use at home. I am a coder first and foremost, and the only time I fire up a wordprocessor is for simple documents. (Even though I support Open Office here, I actually prefer abiword)
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There is nothing wrong with you saying about costing for some firms is cheaper than an open office solution, however it would be nice to be informed under what conditions MS office is better. I can never prove my experiences and we can both debate around in circles about what is more cost effective. My comments are intended so that people consider the alternatives. If a company finds that they would be better with MSoffice then I dont have a problem with that.
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One last thing, I dont claim to have tried what you were saying about mailmerge in Open Office, when you said "It took him five times as long to do a mail merge in Open Office - and that's a very common business task."
But thats certainly a suggestion for the Open Office developers to consider in the next version. Ill pass it on.
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Thanks for the discussion Jess. I hope I am right and you are Andre's replacement here. At least we can have a sensible, adult conversation. Although Andre, if you feel the need to return with a little light entertainment, we'd love to see you again!

There is one thing I'd still like to come back on about your comment, just as something for people to think about. These "traditional" companies might not use all the wonderful features available in MS Office (or the advanced features in whatever office application you care to name) right now, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't benefit if they changed their methods slightly and decided to embrace those functions.

I'll try and demonstrate what I mean. Like just about everyone else, while I was a student, I did summer jobs to help pay me through the rest of the year. One of those was as PA to a guy who, wihle being an amazingly nice guy, wasn't exactly Mr Technology. His method of storing contact information was his little (actually fairly brick-like) black book. Let's imagine there's a Mr Person, who works for a company called Company who do garden design. That contact could be in the book under P for Person, C for Company or G for garden. And, if my boss needed to contact the garden designer for a particular project but couldn't remember the name, he would have to hunt through his entire book or search for a document mentioning the name. And the book wasn't necessarily up to date.

While I was there, my boss went on holiday for two weeks and I ran out of jobs to do other than sit there and mind the phone. So I designed a simple contact database. The fact that I used Access is pretty much irrelevant; I could have used any decent personal database program to get the same result. I created a database of contacts that had separate tables for each project and that could be ordered and searched by name, address, company, project, job role or whatever he wanted. My boss came home from holiday and was really impressed. Over the rest of the time there, I easily demonstrated that I could find any contact's details much faster with the database than he could with his book - every time.

But he wasn't going to change his method of storing contact details. He wasn't going to take the time to learn how to keep the database up to date. Despite him seeing how much easier it was for me to use the database, I'd place money on the fact he still uses his black book.

This is a simply example, but it reflects a much larger situation.

There may well be a lot of companies out there who you would consider "traditional" who just don't realise that their work would be easier and more efficient if they did use some of the advanced functions you claim they don't require. I'm not saying they all would, and for some the change in methods would be a lot more than others, but I think a lot of businesses could get a lot of benefit out of using software to its full potential. Just because they don't currently use all the features, it doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit if they did.

Just something to think about, and this isn't necessarily restricted to Office.

Quote "There may well be a lot of companies out there who you would consider "traditional" who just don't realise that their work would be easier and more efficient if they did use some of the advanced functions you claim they don't require."
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Yep, I completely agree, but on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of companies that to be as efficient DONT need all the advanced functions. I would like everyone to consider a workplace where they have been that has a complete MSoffice suite and its been used for nothing more than Wordprocessing, I can think of at least 3 jobs in the past that I have had where this is the case. In these instances they would have been no worse or better off for having Open Office, except they would not have had to worry about licenses.
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The debate is great Jess, and again we can go around in circles as Im sure you have just as many valid points as I do. The unfortunate thing about MS is that IMO it does not want you to try alternatives and that could be a risked sale. MS at the end of the day is there to make money, nothing more, nothing less and as long as its doing that I dont believe its particularly relevant how productive its clients are (IMO)
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You can see the signs of desperation there (IMO), look at the Novell deal and the "power" behind that, look at the way its now trying to push its toolbar onto users with a Java upgrade. This doesnt sound like the antics of company with an excellent product, it sounds to me like a company that will do anything to get market dominance. If MS products had no issues and were value for money I dont believe there would be a need for comments on this site. We would all be happy MS users. What people havent really mentioned is that MS is using a 3rd party to push its software. Does this sound right for a multi-billion pound company whos products are apparently "the best"?
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Now I have nothing against MS nor it wanting your money, what I have a problem with is the fact that if it went unchallenged it would be convincing everyone that MS way is the only way, there are no problems with Vista and Open Office is nowhere near as useful to everyone as MSoffice.
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Ill end on an appology about my spelling in this post, Im doing a few things at once and as MS would say "It will be better next time"
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Jess, great as always talking with you.