Office 12

Office 12

This year Microsoft also plans to launch an updated and revamped version of its popular office suite called the Office 2007 intended to rejuvenate sales and stave off competitors. Traditionally Office productivity suites are Microsoft cash products that make up of almost 1/3rd of its total revenues. With greater focus on collaboration, office 2007 boasts of new feature that will help customer to be more efficient in their work(.

The new office products will feature a completely revamped user interface. There will dramatic changes in the way things are designed and displayed on the screen. For years, Microsoft has been trying to add new features to Office without realizing that many customers still remained unaware of the product improvement taking place. Recent study showed that every 8 of 10 feature demanded by the customers in the new version where actually present in the e older version, people just dint know they existed.

Indeed, Office has become a case study for feature creep--the phenomenon in which a simple technology becomes complicated and unmanageable through the addition of new features. Office, which once had 100 commands neatly organized into menus, ballooned to contain some 1,500 commands located in scores of menus, toolbars and dialog boxes.

Having sensed that the software has reached the limits of functionality, Microsoft has been preparing its most radical overhaul ever for Word, Excel and friends. With Office 12, due next year, the company plans to do away with a system that depends on people remembering which series of menus lead to a particular command. Instead, users will see a "ribbon" of different commands above their document, with the options changing depending on the task.

The beauty of the new system is that it works with you i.e. the minute you begin to work, the ribbons (adaptive menus) change according to tasks needed to be finished. When editing in Word, for example, the ribbon presents only those choices that have directly to do with formatting content. And even then, the goal is not to present every possible option, but rather the couple dozen choices that represent the majority of the clicks people typically make. Thus it is a totally new design that will eventually help people to be better at what they do.

In addition to the ribbon, Microsoft is intorducing a number off other design concepts to help people find more of the features buried inside the office tools. One of the new ideas is the galleries concept in which range of more complex frequently used editin choice are offered as click options. Those who don’t find a template they want can always create custom alternative suing dialog bix. Microsoft is also adding a live preview option that displays the impact of such choices prior to accepting a doc change.

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Strategy

The move to new office could help Microsoft in its perennial quest to come up with enough reasons to prompt current Office users to upgrade, and might also stem some defections to rivals, such as OpenOffice. At the same time, it risks alienating some loyalists, as well as prompting some businesses to question the cost of retraining those accustomed to the current Office.

The stakes are high: Office has long been one of the company's most profitable products. Microsoft's Information Worker unit, which includes Office and related tools, generated more than $11 billion in revenue--more than one third of Microsoft's total revenue in fiscal year 2005, according to the company.

But the growth in revenue has slowed as some customers delay upgrading to new versions, and others switch to "good enough" Office alternatives.

As the company continues to face threat of competition (Hyper competition), It is necessary that it add new features that customer want to see, new way to do things, however keeping the design simple, easy to use, elegant requiring less customer training to learn new products. The key is to be like apple that provides integration between products, which are easy to use, that are user friendly and fun in short.

I hope that the new office address this issues …………………………let wait an watch…..:)

New article source: Microsoft.com, news.com.