David Shapshak Someone with a sense of irony must have chosen “experience” as the buzzword for Microsoft’s new range of software. The world’s largest software maker may have a monopoly in computer operating systems and Internet browsers but it has had a chequered history in launching the new versions of these. The “experience” of new releases of its software are often greeted with thrills of delight, followed by howls of protest when they fail to live up to expectations. It is a common practice for many computer users to wait for the second release, by which stage most of the bugs have been solved. The new release which uses the shortened moniker XP to destinguish itself from all the previous incarnations, which were date-named is hoping to end all that. Microsoft’s latest office productivity software, Office XP, was launched last week and it appears to be a fantastic improvement on an already very useful product. Whatever problems Microsoft may have over complaints of monopolistic practises, it still makes good software, not least of which is the Office range, the worthy leader in this market with 250-million users worldwide.
Microsoft has taken the Internet functionality of the current version, Office 2000, a step further (letting you update live share prices into Excel spreadsheets) and has made inter-functionality between various programs much easier.
But the gee-whiz application in XP (and it is gee-whiz stuff, even for the hardened power users) are the new Smart Tags and Task Panes. The former are icons that appear where the program can perform an action for you. Say you copy and paste text from one document to another, the Smart Tag will let you preserve the original formatting, or match it to the destination document. If you are writing a letter to someone (who is already in your Outlook address book), a Smart Tag will offer to import his address. It’s very useful stuff, especially for people who use Word as their primary writing tool, as I do. The Task Panes are just that: mini-window panes that open on the right of the document and suggest related functions that might be buried in the menu structure. It will show you templates, as well as an improved 24-item history of what you have cut and pasted. Click on any of these with your mouse and you can reuse that segment of text. The improvements are generally impressive. Word has better built-in speech recognition Microsoft has a partnership with Plantronics, who make the headsets and has better error correction for misspelt words, correcting them as you type. Outlook, the all-in-one e-mail and diary called a personal information manager by the industry, has many useful enhancements. Perhaps the biggest applause at Microsoft’s launch function was for the auto-complete function, which completes the full e-mail addresses of commonly e-mailed people. The functionality has been available in the trimmed down Outlook Express since the last release. Both Excel and PowerPoint (presentation software) feature numerous enhancements, and as with all new releases, Office has undergone a redesign in look and feel. But perhaps the largest improvement is the removal of that super-irritating help function, the “office assistant” Clippy so named for being an animated paper clip. Microsoft’s research showed it was the most-despised aspect of the program and the company went so far as to use Clippy’s exclusion as a marketing ploy. During the Office XP demo, Word, the flagship word processing product in Office, crashed and for some inexplicable reason one of the presenters forgot the word “affordable”. They were prompted gleefully by the audience. Microsoft owns both the operating system (OS) market through Windows and the office productivity software market through Office and is muscling its way on to other platforms and arenas. It is pushing its handheld OS, Windows CE (originally Consumer Electronics) that has a significant beachhead through the Pocket PC and is launching its much-vaunted X-box gaming console. However, as is reflected in an accompanying article, Microsoft is also aiming much higher. The software firm’s Internet strategy hinges on .NET and Office XP. Part of the XP strategy offers you Web-based services similar to those available on an Exchange server (where individual users can see co-workers’ diaries and whether they are busy or free). So, if I wanted to do lunch with a friend, I could send them an online appointment (provided they use the same service) and they could accept or reject it. This service is free now, but for how long?
Office XP appears to be a powerful package. I say appears because I’m dreading installing it on my own computer. The last time I did a Microsoft upgrade I was eventually forced to reinstall my whole computer from scratch. For the purposes of this review, I installed my 30-day copy on a more courageous colleague’s machine. What’s more, the Redmond giant is renowned for releasing buggy software that requires numerous patches to fix loopholes and problems that emerge when they are released. Then there’s the hardware concern. As impressive as all the new XP features are, I have no idea how much of my machine’s processing power I will have to sacrifice to get them. And finally, there’s an even more disturbing question: if I’m perfectly happy with my software right now, why pay more for something I may not need? As impressive as the improvements in XP are, are they really features that average computer users truly need? Many consumers are worried about this, it seems, hence Microsoft’s much-touted, and much-disputed, plan to move to a subscription revenue model, through .NET. Instead of buying your software once and using it forever, there are murmurs in the industry that Microsoft will ultimately move to a model when you “rent” your software. Bingo, a guaranteed revenue stream now that new computer sales have slowed. Conspiracy theorists are having a field day proposing Microsoft wants to reinvent the Internet to suit itself, under the guise of being able to let you access your data, diary and e-mail from any device anywhere. I’d like to think I’ve learned from my mistakes and use my “experience” but on the other hand I am very willing to concede that Microsoft has learned from its. Nonetheless, I’m waiting for the second release of Office XP.