I’ve just been watching Scoble’s interview with Julie Larson-Green on Channel 9 where she demonstrates the PDC build of Microsoft Office12. Despite Robert’s aurgasms, I don’t get the big deal.

Yes - it’s prettier, and that’s nice. I like pretty as much as the next person. The general tone of the demo reminded me of Windows ME. WinME was prettier than Windows 95 too. Remember what a great product Windows ME was!? Yeah… right. Now, of course, MS did much better when they gave us the prettiness of WinME combined with the stability of WinXP.

So, my question for Microsoft, is this:

How will forking out the money for this product/upgrade make my life significantly better?

To be specific:

* Will this product save me significant time and/or effort and/or money every day?
o Is it more stable?
o Will Outlook toolbars stop failing and crashing?
o Is it faster?
o Does it help me share information seamlessly with my colleauges and my customers?
o Does it have RSS integrated?

The “ribbon” is nice, but I don’t believe Julie’s demo indicated that it is really going to address the main concerns I listed above.

Example:
ACTIVEWORDS gave me an exponential productivity boost.
RSS Readers have me an exponential productivity boost.

Will Office12 give me an exponential productivity boost?

I like pretty. I love the OSX interface. But software is about more than being pretty, right?

Now, perhaps Office12 will make my life significantly better, but I just didn’t see it presented that way in Julie’s video.

Final point - I love what Robert is doing with Channel 9. Simply shot, no frills, but it bloody works. This is the future kids.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 at 12:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.