Missing Features

Microsoft Office is suffering from version rot.

Yes, Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint are outstanding software applications. And yes, the new interface for Office 2007 is a big leap forward in terms of productive interface design. But the software package hasn’t really changed much in terms of feature set for almost 10 years.

Wait! You forgot One Note!

Nobody needs One Note, nobody uses One Note, and nobody is helped by One Note. When you dream up a software product in an conference room that serves a need that doesn’t come from your customers (either by those customers directly saying I need to do X but can’t or by listening to what your customers actually do) you are headed in the wrong direction.

And no one uses Groove either, the great and pointless defensive acquisition. The only time a user actually interacts with Groove is just after the install of Office 2007 and they start to see Groove mentioned everywhere, and get annoyed because it doesn’t appear to do anything.

So What Can Microsoft Do?
To really add value to Office Microsoft needs to start porting expensive software packages that we all use into Office. Like what?

How about a photo editor — designed t0 work well for web developers and home users — with about 10% of Photoshop’s features, like:

• crop tool
• layers
• color control
• export options/file types conversions

This is nothing new. Redmond didn’t innovate Word or Excel. So why try to start now when innovation via large capital expenditures doesn’t work (16th paragraph from the bottom) in any industry?

(Companies with more than 100 employees tend not to innovate. If you have the cash then you should buy or steal be inspired by other products.)

But Redmond won’t do this. Why? Because an operating system company doesn’t want to compete with software vendors who build technology on top of it’s technology platform.

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