Office 12 to ease lines of communication | CNET News.com

being the product manager for Office has got to be one of the toughest gigs in the industry. On one hand they drive so much frickin revenue through that product that the downsides from screwing it up are huge, and on the other, it's been around for so long that coming up with new things must be an exercise in futility... what are you gonna do, add a new macro to Excel?

Office is one seriously impressive product, there isn't anyone who can honestly say that don't find some utility in it, and coupled with the security that comes from it being a bona fide standard, it's hard to use anything else. I use OpenOffice on my home computer, but every now and again there is some unexplained glitch or weirdness in the way it handles a powerpoint or word doc that someone sends me. I think OO is actually better in some ways, but the point is that I wouldn't use it day-in-and-out if I depended on it. My wife bought a new Powerbook this weekend and it, of course, doesn't come preloaded with Office. She asked me what she should do, to which I said that she could try OpenOffice but I would really hate for her to run into some problem when she really couldn't afford it... so I recomended that she buy the student version of Mac Office for $150 rather than use something she wasn't familiar with. I think that attitude pretty much sums up what a lot of people think.

Link: Office 12 to ease lines of communication | CNET News.com.

Recognizing a shift in the way people work, Microsoft is putting more emphasis on collaboration in the next version of Office.