Many folks today have developed a skepticism that Microsoft can innovate or use other than monopoly power to dominate. I have been thinking about this winter while teaching “Applied Technology” in the University of Mass Boston’s Labor Studies Program. The course includes introducing a lot of technology very quickly to a fairly diverse group of students. Over the course of the last couple months, I found myself giving mixed messages about choices among Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and Google Docs. And while I see smart use of both Open Office and Google Docs, Microsoft Office remains the preferred choice—even without the steep nonprofit discount.
Idealware.org has covered this topic before, including these articles and posts, and plans to update for Office 2010 soon:
Meanwhile, here’s my own update on things. What struck me in this class, is that the choices have less to do with feature comparison that with the surrounding factors that affect overall experience. I found myself starting nudging everyone to consider Open Office or Google docs, at least because student discounts on Microsoft products are not as generous as nonprofit. Students have enough expenses so why add to them by only teaching Microsoft Office 2007? What I see more clearly is that there are good reasons to choose among them, and they don’t primarily have to do with “features.”
Here are my admittedly subjective “top five” lists for each:
My Top Five Reasons to Use Microsoft Office (2007) 
- Templates and other design gadgets and features, including Calibri and other new fonts:
- Stability and reliability of advanced formatting features
- Programmability (macros, Visual Basic from within or controlled from without for office workflows)
- The new ribbon user interface
- Availability of books and tutorials, including Microsoft’s own excellent free on-line tutorials at office.microsoft.com
My Top Five Reasons to Use Open Office (3.2)
- Free and Open Source
- Simple, familiar menus, easy to find things and no ribbon
- Cross platform: Mac, Windows, Linux all work and look the same
- Adherence to standards, for example in preparing text for the web,
- Security and privacy: not on the web, self-hosted and managed, and requires less maintenance to keep secure from threats than Microsoft Office.
My Five Top Reasons to use Google Docs
- Collaborative features: sharing documents, revisions
- On-line use anywhere
- Simple basic everyday features right at hand
- Gadget library to extend features
- Simple Google Forms to enter data.
(I’m focusing here on Google Docs, though other on-line office suites, such as from Zoho.com, offer similar pros and cons.)
Some observations: Design vs Simplicity vs Collaboration.
In advising my students, I noticed that I came back to the first point in each list as a reason for choosing one over the other. Microsoft Office’s add-on libraries (mostly on-line at office.microsoft.com) really make it easy to find something close to what you want for an unfamiliar task, including community ratings. And the new fonts really are excellent. Arial? Tahoma? Vedana? Calibri is a really fine general purpose font.
Some folks, maybe new users, may find the new Microsoft ribbon menus a pleasing way to acclimate oneself to everyday tasks. I suspect that most experienced folks who just want to get their work done prefer the familiar style of menus Office used to have and which Open Office, and most software, still has. Less clutter and distraction. And Google docs are all about collaboration. Nothing beats being able to have a team phone call with several people taking notes in a Google doc or filling in a spreadsheet interactively.
Free versus Open Source
Yup, Free vs Open Source vs Proprietary is increasingly complex. All three products here would not exist if not for gigantic corporate patronage: Microsoft vs Sun/Oracle (Open Office) vs Google. While Open Office remains free, my suspicious mind tells me that if Microsoft Office suddenly disappeared, the corporate oriented paid subscription support model (which already exists) would loom larger overnight. And in the case of Google, free does not mean open source. While Google does Open Source many things, you cannot license and install your own copy of Google docs on your own server. Use it on Google’s terms or not at all.
Perhaps related, nothing is really free. In the nonprofit and educational worlds, you can get discounted copies of Microsoft Office. The student edition is not as subsidized as the nonprofit copies. For a college student paying a few hundred dollars for a netbook for class work, the additional $80 to $125 for Office may be a lot less than the commercial cost, but it’s still a substantial proportion of the cost of the computer overall. I’m so used to nonprofit clients being able to get MS Office license for nickels on the dollar, I appreciated the opportunity to step back a bit to reflect on the costs that everyone else has.
Nonprofit staff are often working with clients, volunteers, community partners who likely work or live elsewhere. If you build a collaborative or leadership model based on using features only in Microsoft products, you create a gap—technical, leadership, financial—between yourself and your staff and everyone else.
And probably the biggest part of what is coming with Office 2010 will be its free on-line version, a direct and likely compelling challenge to Google Docs. Office Live will be free, presumably to introduce users to the full-featured installed versions of things. (Office 2010 is also Office 14, in case you were wondering about my title.)
Old Story: Design Gizmos Don’t Make You a Designer
Having access to tons of templates, smart art, and all the other design extras doesn’t make you a graphic designer. Much of the reaction in recent years to overwrought Powerpoints, weighted down with sight and sound effects, is purely aesthetic. It distracts rather than keeps an audience’s attention.
PresentationZen, by Garr Reynolds, shows that having a graphically powerful presentation takes more than clicking on templates from a library. I suspect some of this reaction also reflects an awareness that flashing all the Microsoft gadgetry just creates gaps with those with older software or free alternatives. It distracts and reinforce gaps and divides rather than draws everyone else in.
Other Thoughts
I need to add something about performance. There is a perception that Microsoft Office, weighted down with features (“bloatware,” etc) runs slowly. Well, Office 2007 had pretty reasonable performance, and I am trying out Office 2010. Office 2010 loads amazingly fast, even in beta. Its performance will be a real attraction. Open Office has been playing catch-up in this regard. Open Office 3.1 and 3.2 are getting there in the performance department, impressively. And of course, if you are working on a low powered netbook, nothing will be better than working on line in Google docs, so long as you have a reasonable internet connection. (Not at all amusingly, in order to install the 3.2 OpenOffice upgrade on my Ubuntu netbook, I had to search the Internet to find how to overcome a series of warnings that it was not appropriate for “low powered” netbooks, but it runs fine now.)
Coming from a software developer perspective, I also have to add a point about programmability and data interchange. Most of us most of the time just write, chart, present, collect data. When you need to automate those tasks, integrate them with other work going on, and in general raise the level of office productivity, you look for the programmability of the software you use. Microsoft Office has a dozen years or more of well trodden paths for generating documents, charts even presentations. Of course, Open Office is steadily adding macro support, and Google docs exist in a whole ecosystem of Google-friendly web services. A good way to measure this is to go on the Salesforce App Exchange site. Search for “Google” and you see more entries than for “Microsoft” right now. That covers anything and everything of course, and if you are looking for really high powered automated document generation, such as with CongaComposer, there is going to be more tools for Microsoft Office than anything else. If you don’t use Salesforce, check the tools and partner products pages for the software you use: this might well affect which office suite you use when.
Final note: At the Nonprofit Technology Conference this year, I won a Microsoft Zune at an end-of-the day reception. The prize after me was a notebook computer and other raffles featured iPads. I was happy just to win. I had never held a Zune or even seen one, and I was skeptical. They are Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. You know what? It turns out to be a nice piece of hardware. And the software is pretty sharp as well. I'll keep my other music options too, but I’m going to keep this and experiment.
It's great the Oracle will continue to sponsor OpenOffice, and I use Google tools everyday, but yes, Microsoft is doing some cool things, too.
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