Office and its rivals
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- Desktop Evolution, October 2002
Microsoft's Office suite dominates desktop computing. There are alternatives, but how do they measure up in terms of features and functionality?
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The biggest problem for the Lotus marketing team is that Smart Suite offers few clear differentiators from Microsoft Office. Given the commitment of Microsoft to stay ahead, and the resources it has, that is unlikely to change in the near future.
Microsoft OfficeXP
Stephanie Thorn, Microsoft's product manager for the Office suite, wants to persuade people that MS Office is the most popular office suite for a reason.
“I have a strategy called 'Seeing is Believing'. Lots of people ask themselves, 'Do I need this extra knob or whistle? Do I need Smart Tags?' I put them in front of a copy of OfficeXP and pretty soon they're decided.”
OfficeXP is the “most secure, most reliable suite” available, she argues, and worth every penny. In the latest version of MS Office, the new “bells and whistles” are mostly usability improvements such as Task Panes that sit at the side of the screen. These have links to commonly performed functions.
These were initially introduced for a strange reason. “We have a wish list to which people can add things they want in future versions of Office. [But] Many of them were things that Office could already do. So we made them more accessible using Task Panes.”
Smart Tags uses the tight integration of the Office suite. It highlights areas of text that might correspond to addresses or contacts in Outlook's address book, so that users can easily insert contact details without having to open Outlook. They also allow users to alter the format of newly-pasted text to match that of their current document.
Another feature of XP of which Thorn is proud is Sharepoint, a way to produce a collaborative web site for a work group without any HTML knowledge “in just three clicks”. Thorn admits, however, that few people are yet using that feature.
Office also has far better localisation than competing packages, with 40 languages built-in including bi-directional languages such as Hebrew and Farsi. More importantly for the UK, Welsh proofing tools are included.
While many people may be tempted to look at another suite because of price, security or features, Thorn says they will be making false economies. “If it's a large company, the cost of the software is not the largest overall cost. A lot of customers have invested in macros and templates - many of the other suites can't import our templates or the files don't look the same. If you're a start up and you're passed a file by a partner and you can't open it, what can you do?”
Other packages
There are many other packages that offer Office-like capabilities - some of which have been around many years. They include Anywhere office, Ability Office, Pro PC Suite 2001 and ThinkFree Office. All of these have similar capabilities and include differentiators such as diagramming tools.
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