Office 12 opens the door to OpenOffice

. . . keeping an eye on the penguin

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Mar. 02, 2006

Microsoft's Office 12 is coming, and eWEEK's Peter Galli has found that even shops that believe in Microsoft products -- the fools! the fools! -- are having doubts about it and are thinking about other alternatives.

The main problem is that Office 12 has a new user interface.

Previously, if you knew Word For Windows 2.x and you were dropped in front of Word 2003, you might fumble around a bit, but the skills you learned on one would still server you in good stead on the more modern word processor.

That's not the case with Office 12.

The biggest change is that instead of the drop-down menus and tool bars approach that almost all applications use these days, Office 12 has replaced them with a ribbon of frequently used commands.

See for yourself...

Here's Office 2003
(Click image to enlarge)

Here's an Office 12 screenshot from Microsoft
(Click image to enlarge)

And, here's OpenOffice.org 2.01
(Click image to enlarge)
If you were going from Office 2003 to one of the other two, which one do you think would be easier to pick up?

It's not even a contest.

Microsoft is also introducing a new proprietary office format, Open XML. Now, setting aside the whole issue of the benefits of open formats like OpenDocument vs. fake open standards like Open XML, customers are really worried about how backwards-compatible Office 12 will be at older Office formats, and how well older Office suites are going to do with reading Open XML.

If you're a business, file compatibility is a major deal, and Microsoft has a lot of companies sweating now.

When you put all these concerns together, Galli found, many people are really worried about this upgrade.

The end result is likely to be that many businesses are simply not going to upgrade until their old Office suites fall apart. But, for those with Office 97 or earlier who are already at that point, or those who want to do better but don't think Microsoft's way is it, then now is probably the best time ever for OpenOffice and other open-source office suites vendors to make their pitch.

In the end, Office 12 may benefit open-source office suite vendors' bottom line more than it does Microsoft's.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

(Please note: the Office 12 screenshot is used with permission of Microsoft Corp.)

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