How Much Office Functionality Do We Really Need, Anyway?

Submitted by jbreland on Tue, 10/14/2003 - 19:42

This surprisingly accurate article questions just how much functionality consumers need in an office suite. The author points to the recents statements of Microsoft's Jeff Raikes dismissing open source office suites as "being where we [Microsoft] were with Office 97." But, leaving reality for a moment and accepting that as truth, is that really such a bad thing? Consider: what important feature of any office suite component do you use that was not available in 1997? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Now, let's jump back into reality. OpenOffice 1.1.0, for example (since it was released just last week), does not contain every feature as Office 2003, or even Office XP. No one would say otherwise. However, it doesn't need every feature, as very many of them are pure fluff. In addition, it supports several features that MS itself can't match, such as native support for PDF and Flash export.

I strongly recommend reading this article. I know I mostly turned this post into a sales-pitch for OpenOffice, but that's neither my nor the author's intention. He questions the need to upgrade to versions of MS Office from any office suite, even previous MS ones, as they all contain the basic functionality that any office worker or home user could need. Definitely an enlightening read.