Re: Upgrading Office X

From: DMCG (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 04/08/04 

Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 08:41:35 -0700

What would I like to see Microsoft do on the upgrade CD? All I want is a full
install CD so I don't have to go through what I do now when the program
needs to be reinstalled.

Is this too much to ask?

At $229, I would actually pay another $25 just to see you provide a new CD
every time there is an update. Many software companies do this. So what is
the big deal?

I am submitting this same request to Mactopia for about the 4th time.

>-----Original Message-----
>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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