FORUM 10: More To Life Than The Office

Things To Think About

Instead of buying Microsoft Office, consumers also have the options of buying other programs such as IBM workplace, OpenOffice, or ajaxWrite. Office has a 95% market share and 400 million copies in use. These figures are probably so high because Office’s toughest competition is none other than, well, Office. That is, older versions of Office. This is because people have grown accustomed to their older versions of Office and don’t really see the need in upgrading to the newer versions.

OpenOffice is described as a clone to Microsoft’s Office because it works in the same way that Office does and the documents made in one of the programs can be viewed in the other. While documents made in OpenOffice can be viewed in Microsoft’s Office, it isn’t necessarily true the other way around. Not all documents made on Microsoft’s Office can be seen on OpenOffice, which is one of the main drawbacks for OpenOffice since Microsoft’s Office is still a widely used program. This may only last so long though because the International Organization for Standardization approved a new technology standard. This new standard is called the Open Document Format which assures that any word processor or spreadsheet application must communicate freely with any other.

The government, such as the executive branch of Massachusetts has decided to adopt the new Open Document Format standard. This means that no one company will be able to can bind their customers to one Word Processor. Microsoft will not have this though. Their plan, make their own new file format which they will license for free to all comers. This creates a new competition of document format standards. Though it may sound unfair to Microsoft that the government is adopting a new standard, this makes it better for the market place. If they adopt a new standard then it will create competition in the marketplace and that will give the average consumer more options of what word processor they want to purchase. The government it not stopping Microsoft from selling its product, they are just making them adapt to others needs, and not the average consumer have to stay up to date with Microsoft’s applications.

Even though there are more online applications for word processors being developed, I personally don’t think that Microsoft has to worry. Even though the applications online are available for free, some people may feel that it doesn’t provide as much security or simplicity as Microsoft Office; this is why many people are still sticking with their Microsoft Office programs. Just because young users are the people who are becoming more online savvy does not mean that they will be creating all of their documents on these free applications.

I believe that Microsoft Office may become integrated in the future. Some people may find it necessary for the different programs such as word and spreadsheets to be separate, but others may find it easier if these programs were all in one. This is why I think Microsoft Office will develop an application where you can choose if you want all of the applications integrated or not. If you want to see what an integrated program looks like go to Evermore Integrated Office. EIOffice is software that is Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Presentation Graphics, and Macro Editor integrated into one application with the look and feel of Microsoft Office.