Re: Upgrading Office X
From: JE McGimpsey (jemcgimpsey_at_mvps.org)
Date: 04/08/04
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Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004 01:31:50 -0600
In article <16c3f01c41cc9$41ecd1e0$a601280a@phx.gbl>,
"Ted Grigg" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> McGimpsey, you say :
> "I don't understand what is so "user unfriendly" about it, though -
> all that you need to do is insert the previous version's CD when
> prompted while starting up the first time. It does, of course, mean
> you need to keep track of an additional CD."
>
> That's my point, why put the monkey on the user to make installations and
> reinstalls more complicated than they have to be.
Sorry - I don't see this as more complicated that it has to be. What
method would you suggest to ensure that upgrade installations were based
on previously purchased licenses? The monkey is on the user's back
because MS is giving them a substantial discount on the upgrade. The
only simpler method I can think of would be to charge the same for
upgrades and new purchases (which of course you can do now), but then
perhaps I'm not overly clever.
> You say:
> "Have you updated to Office 10.1.5? It's generally pretty solid, though
> of course it still has some bugs. If you have specific suggestions, make
> sure you've sent feedback via the Help/Feedback menu in any Office v.X
> app."
>
> Yes, I have updated it. In fact, every time I reinstall, I have to go through
> three updaters. Again, this cumbersome update process adds to the
> requirement of keeping up with the additional CD install for the upgrade
> steps when one needs to uninstall, then reinstall the program. So the impact
> of all of these extra steps really is not user friendly IMHO.
True, and my views on updates have been discussed in previous threads.
It's utterly irrelevant to the issue of upgrade pricing/installation,
however.
> And your statement that it is "generally solid" says it all. When was
> "generally solid" ever acceptable in the Mac world.
"Acceptable"? Perhaps never, but tolerable? Since about 1984, IIRC.
That's when I got my first taste of Macintosh instability, and until
*very* recently, that meant the OS, too. By "generally solid", I mean
that I never crash an Office v.X application unless I'm doing something
that less than 1% of users even attempt.
> You would think that with Microsoft's resources and a great OS that
> you could create something that is "very solid" and keep it that way.
Actually, while I've spent the last three days in Redmond telling the
MacBU folks what I think of their product - and I was certainly not
complimentary about everything - as a developer, I'm continually amazed
that such a small group accomplishes what it does.
MacWord consists of a couple of million lines of code, mostly accreted
over the last 18 or so years, much of it bad code ported from the
windows side. The other apps are similar. Industry-wide, one
programmer-year of debugged code is, at best, 10K lines. Reviewing and
rewriting all the code is thus beyond MacBU by more than an order of
magnitude.
And don't kid yourself about "Microsoft's resources". MacBU lives or
dies on its own, just like nearly every other division of Microsoft.
Given that Macs constitute about 2% of the market, and that the Mac
market is less likely than the general market to purchase Office, that
means that the resources MacBU can bring to bear are rather limited.
Even the "great OS" is at best a mixed bag to MacBU. Do you remember how
many patches came out in the first few months after OS X launch? How the
great Unicode capability was so buggy even in the later OS X Betas that
the routines couldn't be relied upon by developers? The "great OS"
*will* be a great OS, but it's still very much a work in progress, and
still has tons of bugs that break vendor apps. Apple has always been
rather dogmatic about vendors adhering to their standards, but they've
often been rather slipshod about their own products.
> As with many Mac/Office users, we demand only the best.
Horse hockey - most avid Mac users are long used to accepting
second-tier features and software. Most of us will clutch at any excuse
to avoid moving to a wintel machine - it's a kind of religious
experience - Macs as totems rather than tools. There are loads of things
to like about Macs, but "demanding the best" has never been a criterion
for membership in the club.
>And upgrading to this new version does not inspire confidence that
>these bugs were ever solved and that the new features will not add new
>bugs.
Your sentence makes an assertion without any support. What about
upgrading doesn't inspire confidence? Do you have any specifics?
> You say:
> "Whether fortunately or unfortunately, the software industry (not just
> MS) can't simply release "more solid" applications and get paid for it.
> The industry model for the last 15 years, at least, has been that
> consumers expect "fixes" to be free (rightly so, perhaps). The trick for
> MS, Apple, Adobe, etc., has long been to cover the cost of the fixes by
> introducing new features that people will pay for. As a business model,
> being in maintenance mode (i.e., just making the product more solid) is
> tantamount to shutting down the store."
>
> At last, honesty.
I find that extremely offensive.
> What you are implying is that fixes don't pay.
Wrong. I'm not implying anything. I'm stating it flatly. Customers pay
for features. Fixing a bug is *not* a feature. Fixing bugs for free is
an expected part of producing software from the consumer's perspective.
> So you add more features, and even more bugs through this complexity
> to exascerbate the problem. Dare I say it, THINK DIFFERENT. This
> model creates bloat and instability.
Perhaps, perhaps not, and mostly irrelevant in any case. Thinking
different doesn't cut it when no one buys the product. Do you honestly
think that MS, or Adobe, or Apple wouldn't *love* to simply issue a
major bug fix release and have customers eagerly hand them money? Don't
you think they've done research that explores that possibility?
Your platitude is true only when you assume that previous instability is
not addressed along with the addition of new features. This is clearly
not the case here - one should expect a *lot* of instability when moving
to a new, and rather buggy OS (remember that the Office feature lists
had to be locked at least a year before release of OS X) that required a
herculean effort to ship in an accelerated time frame. I would expect
every improvement in stability in Office v.X to be reflected in Office
2004, along with improvements that were just not cost effective to fix
in v.X. Overall, there's no simple relationship between stability of
versions and new features, for any software house.
> I do contribute to feedback, but my suggestions cannot work when this
> philosophy is applied. A better way needs to be found to make the product
> at least as stable as the OS --- which it is not.
Give some specifics. While your idealism is nice, *NOBODY* builds
commercial applications under those criteria, and it's not because
software engineers are too lazy or stupid to have figured out how. You
*can* make zero-bug code - it will either be too trivial to do anything
very useful, or it will cost orders of magnitude more than the market is
willing to pay. Would you pay $2,300 for a single license Office
upgrade? $23,000?
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