MS Office in some Trouble
Apparently, this is one of the top new features MS is touting to get people to pay hundreds of dollars a screen for MS Office upgrades:
The new version of Microsoft Corp.'s Office
software will let users save documents in the popular PDF format, as
part of efforts to broaden the appeal of the new Office product and get
people to upgrade.Office 12, which is due out by the end of
2006, faces some of its stiffest competition from existing users who do
not see the need to upgrade from previous versions. Microsoft is
aggressively touting new functions, such as the PDF support, to try to
spur upgrades and appeal to people who might otherwise not buy Office
at all. The Office suite retails for between $149 and $499, depending
on which edition a user chooses.
Oooo, that's really going to do the trick. Kind of like urging you to trade-in your car because the new one has more cupholders. Of course, Open Office is free, is working great for us, and already has a built-in export to pdf.
boo:
I like to call Office 12 the Sarbanes Oxley Office suite. The *real* revenue getter will be the enhanced tracking, permissions and increased flexibility of being able to deal with XML-based documents. PDF is part of that, of course, but not the only part.
Think about how much public companies are spending for SOx compliance already and an extra few hundred $ is nothing.
Of course, as you are not a public company, you're not obligated to deal with this nonsense, so more power to you with a non-MS setup.
October 3, 2005, 5:46 pm