One of my buddies, and a close friend of our Orlando IT Pro group, always opened his seminars with a story about how one of his friends never bothered upgrading his Office 97 because it was “just good enough”. His response was: “Of course it is good enough, because you use it the same way” reinforcing the message that the new features of Office 2003 lead to greater productivity, security and accessibility.
That is quite clearly Microsoft’s direction – you need more features! With the exception of Microsoft Outlook 2003, I on the other hand use about 5% of the features of Office 2003 and could quite easily get by with Office 2000. So could nearly all of my customers and partners and if it were not for the fear of security threats that a discontinued product presents, I’d be writing this text in Word 2000.
I am not alone. Earlier this week the Massachusetts state government dumped Microsoft Office for a less functional but free, open and working alternative. People go against Microsoft solutions every day, but the news here is that customer(s) are starting to accept the feature-price tradeoff if the alternative is “good enough” while also being free and secure.
What is even more important is how will your business change if more businesses go with the minimal solution that just gets the job done. Significant part of the IT VAR revenues comes from platform upgrades, and if the next release upgrade cannot be justified, where will you make money? Just something to ponder…
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