J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Microsoft Office Is Obsolete?

Somebody named Joe Wilcox declares: Microsoft Office is obsolete, or soon will be.

This month's Office 2010 retail pricing announcement and ongoing discounts for Office 2007 Home and Student are Microsoft's tacit acknowledgment that the productivity suite isn't as valuable as it once was. Office is tracking a course of unplanned obsolescence and the inevitable end shared by oh-so many other products: Commoditization.

Or, maybe lower prices can be explained by competition.

I'll ask upfront: Do you really need Microsoft Office on a daily basis? Is Office vital to your work day? Do you use it at home? If you use it at work, how often? If you use it at home or for college, how often? Please respond in comments.

My answers are easy. I don't use Office at all.

Well then, I guess we can conclude that nobody uses it.

And then, he asks another stupid question:

Word processing reached commodity status years ago, as more applications incorporated the basic formatting features most people use more than 90 percent of the time. No external wordprocessing program is required to blog, e-mail, instant message, tweet or post to social networks like Facebook. Be honest, how much of the writing you regularly do requires a dedicated wordprocessor?

That's right, Joe. Everybody's writing is limited to 140-character tweets.

And the he moves on to Excel:

What is Excel or any spreadsheet really necessary for? Sure, lots of business people use spreadsheets for data analysis, but what is the need for consumers or even small business owners? Many financial products or services, like Quicken or Quickbooks, put a friendly face on spreadsheets;

And people actually take this guy seriously?

- Reader Comments -

Following are comments in response to this item.
The most recent comment is at the bottom.

1. By Mark. Comment posted 27 January, 2010 10:37am

   Well, this is 2010 and anyone with a pulse can have their own pulpit to talk about anything they want. You can't fix stupid and Joe Wilcox seems to have a case of it on his hands.
   
   Office isn't going anywhere. If anything the advent and advances of Sharepoint Portal server are only going to further entrench Office in the business side of things.
   
   I'll consider cloud computing as soon as it is as secure, fast and feature filled as a desktop product.
   
   For now, you can pry excel from my cold, dead hands.
2. By Mathias. Comment posted 27 January, 2010 11:49am

   Unfortunately, one of the best ways to build traffic on a blog is by flame-baiting - take some outrageous position and get people all worked up. I suspect Joe Wilcox is doing just that; or, he achieved this goal inadvertently through idiocy.
3. By Patrick. Comment posted 27 January, 2010 12:09pm

   Well, the guy got pretty well busted up in the comments posted to that article.
   
   While it is true that MS Office now has worthy competitors in Google Apps and OpenOffice, for that idiot to suggest that "office" (note the small "o") apps are irrelevant is just, well, bizarre...
4. By Ken Puls. Comment posted 27 January, 2010 12:24pm

   What an idiot. From a quick scan of the comments, it doesn't look like he's getting much support either. My personal fav:
   
   "Seriously...if this is how you earn your paycheck, I really admire you...you have got yourself a moron for a boss...lucky you..."
5. By JP. Comment posted 27 January, 2010 12:51pm

   Agreed with Mathias, it's clearly bait. The best thing to do is ignore it, getting all worked up will only encourage the trolls (because that is their goal).
6. By Doug jenkins. Comment posted 28 January, 2010 9:25pm

   If you use it at work, how often?

   
   
   All day, every day.
   
   But 5 years ago I could have said that about Lotus 123, so I'm probably not much of a barometer.
   
   An interesting question is what it would take to move people from Excel to some other software.
   
   For me it would be one of two things:
   A free competitor providing complete VBA support
   Microsoft removing VBA support from Excel
   
   I don't see either happening any time soon, so I guess Microsoft will continue to get my $100/year for some time to come.
7. By Matthew Henson. Comment posted 29 January, 2010 2:40am

   Doing without Office sounds easier than it is. Case in point, my local government organisation (with about 7000 IT users) which switched to Star Office in 2005.
   
   Star (a derivative of Open Office) is not a bad product but it has cost a lot of productivity: it doesn't work exactly the same way, and has limitations like no VBA. Fidelity between Star and MS Office is not perfect, so people needing to exchange documents with outside organisations now generally get permission to buy MS Office. There are now more MS Office installations than before the introduction of Star, though the champion of Star remains employed on a high salary.
   
   The author of the (flame-baiting) blog post is probably right to suggest that some people will abandon Office but not that most will.
8. By Hui.... Comment posted 29 January, 2010 6:10am

   Where's the story about Joe using 2 pieces of wood to start a fire ?
9. By Jon Peltier. Comment posted 30 January, 2010 10:28pm

   If Excel is obsolete, what'll I use to make my shopping lists?
   
   (And oh yeah, I wrote this comment in Word, then copied it and pasted into this comment form.)
10. By fzz. Comment posted 31 January, 2010 2:22pm

    Office isn't going anywhere, but that may be due more to organizational inertia than rational cost/benefit analysis.
    
    From my own admittedly limited perspective, most of the people around me and the ones I work with in other regional offices in fact don't use PowerPoint or Excel very often, though sometimes they do use them for a few hours at a time. They use Word most often, usually to fill out templates, but other than the expense of porting, these could easily become browser-based intranet applications. There's almost no true document creation.
    
    Maybe all business users need a word processor, but do they all need Word? To me it's absolutely clear than 80% or more business users only need the PPT viewer rather than PowerPoint itself. And while I use Excel on a daily basis, fewer than 1/4 of the people I work with do. Office is gross overkill for the vast majority of business users and I figure more than 95% of home users.
11. By Phil. Comment posted 15 February, 2010 7:37am

    Well, Joe seems to be in the lucky position not to do any operational work at all. Looks like all his business correspondence goes through email.
    
    I use MS Word for preparing fax, letters and documentations. (maybe OO Writer is an option here)
    
    I use MS Excel for tracking lists, project calculations, general project management etc. (I don't see an alternative in OO Calc. Oh, and by the way Joe, I don't want my sensitive business data stored on Google's servers utilizing Google Docs)
    
    I use MS Outlook (because it comes with the Office Suite, Thunderbird would work the same for me to be honest)
    
    I use MS Powerpoint to prepare management presentations or introduce our services to new customers (No, I don't want to touch LaTex although it may be capable of reproducing Powerpoint's results).
    
    So this is my usage of the Office environment.
12. By Daddy Dave. Comment posted 06 April, 2010 7:35am

    I actually agree with this guy, except will clarify that MS Office will remain the only real choice for businesses for many more years. Due to a friggin' problem with MS Office 2007 re-registration on a replacement but legal and valid home desktop computer, I've now moved my kids' homework computer to OpenOffice. It does every single thing that kids need for homework. I also setup my parents and aunt's computers with OpenOffice. MS Office is too expensive for a $300 computer and doesn't offer any advantages for basic users. I work at home and therefore keep MS Office on my main computer.
    
    Even the $20mil company that I work for only uses the basic features of Word and Excel. Our standard expense reporting spreadsheet looks like it was setup in 1986 and hasn't changed since. The end is near.