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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: taxman who wrote (23957)	6/10/1999 11:14:00 AM
From: nnillionaire	Respond to of 74651

Taxman, per your request: interactive.wsj.com Microsoft's Office Suite Is Not for the Little Guy EVERY COUPLE of years, millions of computer users are faced with deciding whether to endure the hassle of a major software upgrade to get the latest version of Microsoft's Office productivity suite. Office is the umbrella product containing Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. It's a big decision. Microsoft Office is the standard application for creating the most common types of documents produced on a PC. But upgrading to a new version risks problems and requires adjustments. This week, the company is releasing the latest Windows edition of the suite, called Office 2000. It comes in four main versions, with different combinations of Office components, ranging from $209 to $399 for upgraders and from $499 to $799 if you're buying Office for the first time. Some stores will offer discounts, but this is still an expensive proposition in an age of free and cheap software. Using Office 2000 may also require you to beef up your PC. I wouldn't try using it with anything less than 64 megabytes of memory. However, I may be able to save you the trouble and expense. I've been testing Office 2000 for months now, and I believe that most individuals and small businesses that already use one of the last two versions of Office will gain little or nothing by upgrading. It's not that the program is a dog. It works well, in fact. But this version has been engineered almost entirely for big corporations with speedy networks. Its most significant new features are aimed at helping people who collaborate over a network and post a lot of documents to the Internet or a corporate intranet. By contrast, the new Office has very few significant improvements for composing documents. The suite remains a bloated and dense production, packed with hundreds of marginal "features." Office 2000 takes up between 189 megabytes and 626 megabytes of space on your hard disk for a complete installation, depending on the package you choose. Even the reviewer's guide that Microsoft supplies to journalists is an enormous 23 megabytes, which is larger than many entire programs. OFFICE HAS long been mainly sold to corporations, but in the past, the developers have maintained a balance between working on corporate networking features and on features that make it easier to create documents. This time, the balance shifted way too far toward the needs of corporate networks. "Office 2000 truly extends beyond the desktop, making Office more of an enterprise application," Microsoft boasts. "The new version of Office is in many ways a departure from the Office heritage of integrated, easy-to-use applications, and allows users to move ahead into a new global, Web-centric world." The key new feature is a much-improved ability to read and create documents formatted in HTML, which is the file format used by Web pages. Office 2000 actually elevates HTML to co-equal status with Office's own file formats, such as the DOC format used by Word. The old Office formats haven't changed, except in the Access database program. But unless you create a lot of Web documents, this isn't a very important feature. And other programs, such as Microsoft's own Front Page, are better Web-page editors than Office. Some new features look great on paper but work well only for corporate users. For instance, there's an install-on-demand system that installs core features and then adds other features only as you need them. This is fine in a big company because a new feature can be fetched quickly over the network. But home users must dig out their CD-ROMs each time a feature needs to be installed. I was using Office 2000 on my laptop on a plane this week, when Office announced that a feature I tried to use wasn't installed and demanded my original CD-ROMs. Of course I hadn't lugged the disks onto the airplane. THERE ARE, however, a few nice usability touches. The best is that menus and toolbars can now learn from your behavior and give greater prominence to commands you use most often. This helps cut down on clutter. Another welcome change is that you can now totally banish the annoying animated paper clip and other characters that dance on the screen to offer tips, but which I find too dumb to be useful. Other new features are less impressive. Synonyms are easier to locate, but the thesaurus on which they're based remains awful. The open-a-file screen now lists common folders you use, which is great. But the new design makes it harder to search for files based on words they contain. While composing, you can now cut and paste up to a dozen words or phrases inside a document or among documents, instead of doing it one at a time. But this feature is mainly for power users. And one new feature actually increases screen clutter. In the new Office, every document you have open is listed separately on the Windows task bar, at the bottom of your main desktop. If you have a lot of open documents the task bar becomes so jammed that you can't read the entries in it. In the past, the task bar showed only a single icon for each active Office program. The bottom line for consumers and small businesses is this: If you have a very old version of Office and a fairly new PC, or you need to post a lot of business documents on the Web, it makes sense to upgrade to Office 2000. Otherwise, forget it.