[IxDA Discuss] Critiquing the Office 2007 (was Re: Microsoft tolicense Office 2007 UI system)

[Todd Zaki Warfel]

On Nov 29, 2006, at 8:55 AM, David Malouf wrote:

> To me comqring iWork to Office is comparing apples to oranges.
>
> Office is an Enterrise class suite which has to have a much more  
> robust set of features. Items like merging, track changes, form  
> building, excel integration, DRM, etc for most of us are not what  
> we need but in the Enterrise it is totally necessary.
> ...
> I'd loe to be in a mqc world, but my environments and my contexts  
> continue to be in the enterprise (for me and my users) ... For  
> Enterise comuting there is really no option here as Mac has ignored  
> the enterprise and instead focused on personal contexts.

I strongly disagree. We work with enterprise clients on a regular  
basis - some of the world's largest financial, pharma, and telco  
companies in fact. And we've been successfully using iWork for about  
4 years. There is some migration period and a bit of changing the way  
you think, but we're proof that it can be done.

Enterprise doesn't equal robust set of features and complication.  
Enterprise means being able to handle large amounts of data, or  
requests from masses. It means collaboration. It means efficient  
workflow for multiple people.

We've worked on Enterprise applications that are simple, powerful,  
more useful and usable than their "enterprise" counterparts. We  
worked on a large enterprise application that handles over 25 million  
records and we did it w/o touching MS Office. And you can live w/o  
Excel if you really want to. There are alternatives to Excel if  
you're interested in looking at Open Office. Now, honestly, we still  
use Excel because we've had the app around for over 5 years. So, we  
just use the version of Excel from 2000. And we'll continue to do so  
until a better "non-overly featured" spreadsheet comes out.

We're a Mac only shop and intend to stay that way. We've successfully  
been a Mac only shop going on 5 years now. And most of our clients  
are on Windows. So, I fail to see how/why it can't be done. Our only  
issue is Morea (until we build a replacement). We do use that for  
usability testing. But since we're running Parallels w/XP on it,  
that's no longer an issue. And for a small business it's more cost  
effective than having additional PCs lying around just for testing.

I'm not making these claims based on theory, I've been doing this for  
years and know that it works.

Now, to be fair to Dave, there are some things that simply don't work  
on a Mac at all - like Access. And if you need Access, then you  
should be using Windows. So, either get a Dell/Viao/Compaq, or pick  
up a Mac and put Parallels and Windows on the machine.

Cheers!

Todd Zaki Warfel
Partner, Design & Usability Specialist
Messagefirst | designing and usability consulting
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Email:	todd at messagefirst.com
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In theory, theory and practice are the same.
In practice, they are not.