Microsoft Office - insist on or give up? Giga Independent Evaluation Report Ken Smiley November 2, 2001
GIGA's views have repeatedly increased the investment cost of the current Microsoft platform, people gradually begun to seek alternative office software platforms. The replacement of people, including SUN's StarOffice, Corel's WordPerfect Office and Lotus's SmartSuite, and even some companies also consider using online forms of office applications. The inspection of whether to migrate to a different office platform includes several factors and thorough assessments for overall costs, gains, and risks. GIGA believes that after passing by such an assessment, most organizations currently have been deployed by Microsoft Office will be: preserving the current Microsoft Office office suite or upgrade to an updated Microsoft Office version is the best choice, and Not use other products that compete with Microsoft Office. The evidence is a relatively correct approach when deciding whether or not to migrate to another office platform. GIGA divides these angles to three main categories: function (or advantages), cost and risk. Functions (or advantages) angles include document compatibility, macros, and scripting languages, usage patterns, and future upgrades. Cost angles include investigation on software purchase costs, deployment costs, management tool costs, and support maintenance costs. Finally, in the risk part, the risk of productivity and performance risks and the market survival capacity of the manufacturer will be investigated. Prior to years ago, one of Microsoft Office's most attractive places is its compatibility of other pop programs, especially WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 documents. After Microsoft combines the previous individual products into the Office suite, the performance price compared to a single manufacturer is particularly attractive. Subsequently, Microsoft Office gradually occupied the dominance of the market, and today It has accounted for more than 90% of the market share. Therefore, Microsoft Office's competitive products should be placed at this point of the focus of their products in compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. Because they have such an idea: If an organization can simply replace the word handler or spreadsheet program to re-format all existing documents, then these organizations are certainly Happy to replace their existing Office suite products. However, document compatibility is only one aspect of overall compatibility. In recent years, Office Suite products have grown into a more complex product, just simply provide document compatibility may no longer make competitors get more share in the market. Many users use macro or Visual Basic scripting language in Microsoft Office. Competitive products cannot be compatible in macro or scripting languages, although some products offer their own macros, scripts, and scripting languages. This incompatibility will lead to users to rewrite all macro or scripts, and for those users who use macro and scripts in large users and a large number of users, it is a potential hard work. If you consider third-party applications, compatibility issues are further complicated. Many organizations have developed a lot of applications on the Microsoft Office platform. I hope that these programs can run normally on a new office platform, which is a bad thing, unless the new platform, part or completely rewritten these programs. For an organization, it is common to develop a custom integration between their Office applications and applications or backend data systems. For example, an Excel spreadsheet that acquires data from the Oracle database and constructs it into a data perspective, may stop working unless the organization has established a corresponding link using General standards.
However, standards like Extensible Markup Language (XML) are only recently applied in office procedures, which means that most existing integration does not cleanly perform data between different office suits. transmission. An enterprise currently uses an office procedure to make great effects on it to compete to compete. The range of typical usage patterns include only simple word processing of low-end until high-end advanced applications. Unfortunately, based on the data conducted in Giga's customers, most IT managers do not survey their users to determine how the Office platform is used in the enterprise. Those IT managers who have conducted surveys are very surprised because the existing Office platform integrates the same way. From GIGA's point of view, those who have tried to migrate their office platforms before they do not know how to use the platform in the organization, and the risks of the risks are unbearable. A potential loss of productivity may far beyond the savings of all purchase costs that can be brought by "free" software. Such investigations can also make organizations understand what is real gain. If you want to get your revenue, you can get true benefits by upgrading the existing Office platform. I hope that organizational organizations for the current Office platform and the cost, gains and risks required to consider the cost, benefits, and risks of the upgrade can use GIGA's overall economic impact (TEI) model and employed experts to complete This work (see Planning Assumption, Total Economic ImpactTM: Extension, Part 1, Chip Gliedman). The development direction taken by an application or platform has an equally important status with the current use of the application or platform. Organizations preparing to chase the Office platform should take questions about the upgrade path and development direction of each kit product. Does the manufacturer have a convincing idea for the future development of its office platform? Microsoft has confirmed that it is developing its Office suite into part of the .NET overall framework, .NET will be more closely integrated with Office. Although some vendors, for example, Corel- have already expressed, they will also be closely integrated with .NET, but those organizations that have been committed to the .NET framework will discover, carry out an Office's competitive product with .NET framework Integration is still a very difficult thing. Organizations who have committed the Microsoft platform will find that Microsoft Office will be more beautiful in the .NET framework compared to competitive products. Sun has already said that STAROffice's new version, that is, version 6.0, will pay more attention to localized version of different languages, rather than adding new features or increase compatibility. If the needs of localization is not urgent, the organization will find it does not have to upgrade to version 6.0. Moreover, Sun does not propose an attractive idea in how to close the STAROFFICE in the enterprise. For organizations that consider contact with GIGAs with GIGA, it is: Microsoft Office purchase costs that may be increased under Microsoft's new 6.0 licenses. Although Microsoft has recently responded to user feedback, the deadline of the new license plan has been extended to July 2002. But most customers talk about Office in GIGA still believe that new licensing plans have improved in terms of prices compared to their current Office versions. Many data from GIGA customers point out that each Office XP standard version should be between $ 150 and $ 200.
At first, Microsoft did not include Office 2000 as a current product in a new licensing plan. However, as the date of the new license schedule is extended, Office 2000 has also begun to be a "current" product. This change is particularly welcomed by those who have deployed Office 2000, and may avoid rising today. Taking into account these changes, those who have previously considered other options for the new licensing plan may be necessary to reassess their choices. Office suits from traditional competitors, such as Corel WordPerfect, and Lotus SmartSuite, similar to Microsoft Office with Microsoft Office on pricing methods. Any cost difference between these kits products and Microsoft Office and discussing the discussion of other criteria in this Planning Assumption have proved that from the Microsoft platform to other platforms is a very uncomfortable approach. Online office applications from other companies (such as ThinkFree), bill or year-on-year charges are basically no competitive pressure. The maximum competitive pressure facing Office comes from Sun's StarOffice, especially in Europe, which is more obvious. Although Staroffice is currently available free of charge from Web, you must consider other additional costs associated with office suite product migration when evaluating any migration plan. In any software migration plan, the maximum part of the migration cost is deployment cost. Usually, the deployment cost required for existing platforms is much cheaper than full migration to a new platform. The performance of the deployment tool that can be used on the migrated platform has a great impact on deployment costs. Microsoft Office has a unique advantage in deployment tools. This is unquestionable. Microsoft and third-party manufacturers have made great investment in improving the deployment of Office platform. The organization of the deployment process of the old platform such as Office 97 will find that today's Office deployment has changed much longer than ever. Organizations using desktop management systems (such as Microsoft SMS, Novell ZENworks or Intel's LANDESK) should be inserted for each platform to deploy existing tools. In this regard, Microsoft has once again occupying advantages. The manufacturer of desktop management products has many scripts, tools and experiences in deploying Microsoft's Office suite, and for competition vendors, they may not have these things. Many Microsoft Office users can be more familiar with application patches or fix on the Microsoft Office Suite already deployed. Any competitive assessment should be compared to the upgrade tool available for each platform. Each organization may once again discover that the patch tool on the Microsoft platform is more powerful, but in order to clear this, it should also be considered, and the attacks of the Microsoft platform currently suffer more, so More upgrades are also required. For any office suite product, the largest part of the cost of continuous spending is support costs. All platforms require technical support for a series of transactions from users to solve complex problems. Most of the organization of Microsoft Office's support services, contacts, and support costs is mostly very familiar. However, the support cost of other competitive office suits may be more difficult, and Sun has no research on its STAROFFICE product. I hope to get the organization of STAROFFICE technical support needs to purchase a Sun's support service. If the organization does not sign a SPECTRUM support contract with Sun, the overhead of each desktop will be more expensive.
In addition, in addition to support costs, you should also consider the availability of support services. Microsoft has once again enjoyed a practical benefit in providing support for the organization of Office Suite. The number of books on the Microsoft suite is mostly overwhelming. Microsoft has developed long-term plans to enable the number and strength of third-party enterprises that provide training and support for its products. History proves that cost reduction strategy is rarely played. Whether it is in the form of retention status, or take the path straight change to low-cost products, the results are often reduced in terms of productivity and performance. Even if the cost is reduced immediately, the cost reduction is immediately realized, and the platform will be more deployed and supported by the financial risk that the platform is not reliable. If the upgrade or migration does not bring at least one of the following benefits, then this upgrade or migration may not be performed at all.
Improvements in the operating mode Get the previous competitive advantage return on the return on investment (ROI) and productivity, despite the disputes between the US Department of Justice, Microsoft is still the most important software company in the world. In the case of Microsoft's income, there is no doubt that Microsoft Office is the strongest product. Several Web-based competitors have failed, and the future of Lotus SmartSuite is still controversial. Corel has also entered the state of both Microsoft cooperation and competition with Microsoft (some people call this situation as a "coopetition"), and may soon will continue to launch product compatible with Microsoft .NET in the future. SUN is mainly a hardware company, software products are only independently supported by STAROFFICE products, which is not part of the Sun core strategy, nor it is the main source of income. In the current economic situation, it is not difficult to imagine that Sun may give up some lower-return projects, and concentrate on its core products. There is no comprehensive evaluation of all costs, benefits and risks associated with your own specific environment, but just simply exchange a office suite to another. This move can only bring too much risk, too much hidden Cost and too little benefits. Although there are only a small amount of organizations, especially some small organizations, it may be prepared to migrate to Office's competitive products, but there are some signs that some large organizations may also consider deploying Office of Office at sector-level deployment. For example, a medium-sized organization may believe that its mobile employee uses OFFICE to make simple documentation and send and receive E-mail, and these two functions can be done with a relatively cheap alternative product. The current unknown factor is how much is the impact of a single organization within a single organization and supporting the second Office suite on support costs. If supported by two kits products is less than upgrade costs for the organization's existing Microsoft Office Suite, some users within the organization can make a relatively positive return. GIGA does not have this practice to make this approach to make this approach. However, certain customers of Giga have shown that they are willing to use some of the Office's alternative products in some departments, and then monitor the costs of this deployment and the obtained income. If there is enough large-scale organization to succeed by using this method, GIGA expects Microsoft to be forced to release a "lightweight" version of Microsoft Office to continue to compete in a single office user. Advantages, otherwise these users will migrate to Office's competitive products. Although Microsoft Office is difficult to appear by its opponent product large-scale substitution, if Microsoft's different office needs of customers cannot respond in time, meet some special usage situations and business needs, this situation occurs possible Will get bigger and bigger. As low cost competitive products become more powerful, Microsoft will be forced to make changes, otherwise the market share will be arched to give future competitors. This competition is great for those organizations that are currently seeking alternative products of Office platforms. Conclusion The reduction in IT budgets and Microsoft's 6.0 licenses have prompted individual organizations to consider using other products to replace Microsoft Office. This idea is based on such a foundation, namely, if organizations can use a lower cost alternative product to replace existing word processing or spreadsheet programs, and do not need to reformat all existing documents, The organization can use this product to replace the Office suite. However, document compatibility is just one of the overall compatibility.
