Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky

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082. Defying Conventional Wisdom to Finish Office

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082. Defying Conventional Wisdom to Finish Office

“Short and sweet, the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is **the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software**.” —Anil Dash (Six Apart, Ltd.)

Steven Sinofsky
May 22, 2022
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082. Defying Conventional Wisdom to Finish Office

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As we conclude the story of Office12 and the major redesign of the product, Microsoft of late 2005 to early 2006 is in a bit of a lull which for better or worse is good for the launch of Office. Longhorn continues to stretch out and the lack of clarity continues, which is putting a drag on everyone. There’s something very special, yet bittersweet, about this release of Office.

With the conclusion of this chapter, Hardcore Software, will start to get into Windows. I have about 30 stories planned. As my roles have changed so too have the stories. With Windows, we will see a lot more detail on organization, change management, strategy, and direct competition. If you are not a subscriber, please consider signing up. Audio will continue to be free and posts with all the graphics, artifacts, PDFs, and videos will be available to subscribers.

Back to 081. First Feedback and a Surprise

IMPORTANT: The audio for this edition can be found here. This is the first week where audio generate a second email. Feedback welcome via email or twitter.


Nearly every country’s “Feedback to Corp” slide at the grueling field sales multiweek Mid-Year Reviews (MYRs) in January 2006 published the same bullet point:

🚩 Office “12” – Needs Classic Mode

What was this big, and clearly coordinated push for something called classic mode, and why now? We, of course, knew what it was but we did not know why this was happening now. It was very late in the schedule, post-beta testing. We were just months from scheduled completion as we just went through the final validation of the product—when the team is changing as few things as possible for the last few months, certainly not making any design changes.

A broad public beta went out to most enterprise customers as well as the technical press. More people enrolled in the beta than we expected or could even imagine. There was a great deal of interest in such a bold direction for Office.

As with the technical beta, the reactions came swiftly and clearly, often based on little more than the first few minutes with the product. Reactions from the press arrived in three waves—straightforward news of the release, first looks or reactions based on first experiences, and then, after a week or so, deeper dives into the product.

The first looks wrote themselves as we expected. Office12 was a sweeping change, and the obvious commentary or controversy questioned whether customers or the market were ready for it. Would it work? How difficult would it be to learn? Almost always the point of view of why the change was made was reflected, but the tone was skeptical. That was kind of annoying, but entirely expected.

FAQ: Looking into Office 12  Here's what you can expect from Microsoft's radical revamp of Office, due next year.  Ina Fried Nov. 17, 2005 10:47 a.m. PT 2 min read Office 12 is Office like you have never seen before. With the update, due in the second half of 2006, Microsoft is planning its biggest-ever redesign of its productivity suite, starting with a new user interface. The company hopes to bring an end to the days of clicking on three menus and two dialog boxes just to format a document. In their place, Microsoft has added a ribbon at the top of most documents that aims to offer the most likely menu choices.  The radical revamp could help the company as it seeks to stave off competition from OpenOffice and others, but it also risks alienating those who like things the way they are.  What are the big changes? Office 12 users will immediately notice big changes to the look of Office programs, particularly Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
From CNET, Ina Fried, always fair and balanced, reported the news in a straight-forward fashion while adding the normal caveats that would come from looking at pre-release software. (Source: CNET November, 17, 2005 https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/faq-looking-into-office-12/)

For example, CNET’s Ina Fried who is always fair and balanced, said, “The radical revamp could help the company as it seeks to stave off competition from OpenOffice and others, but it also risks alienating those who like things the way they are.”1

Computer Reseller News, the trade publication focused on small and medium business, went to great lengths to express concern. “While most users will welcome the additional features, Microsoft’s decision to teach its customers a new user interface for accessing commands and functions could be a risky proposition. Once the beta testers (and the bloggers) have registered their opinions, some Office 12 design points could be in for a course correction.”2

CNET editors pick the products and services we write about. When you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Microsoft Office 12 (beta 1) The next generation of the Microsoft Office system offers a new look and feel across its applications, with dynamic formatting tools and nimbler files. Nov. 16, 2005 2:36 a.m. PT cnet Microsoft Office 12 (beta 1) • See the Office 12 slide show Overview: Before the final product is expected to hit the shelves late next year, this initial beta version of Microsoft Office 12 reveals radical interface changes that recall Downside: In the past, Microsoft has sabotaged itself by unrolling too many new the overly ambitious Microsoft Office 97 update. The changes apply to Word, Excel, features to Office too fast. We're keeping a lookout for problems; after all, Office 12 PowerPoint, and Outlook, as Redmond intends to streamline your work flow, was in its storyboard stages just a few months ago. If you've spent the past two years particularly for business users. The familiar File and Edit drop-down menus will mastering Office 2003, prepare for a steep learning curve. The Alt keyboard disappear to make way for functions grouped within a ribbon atop each window. This shortcuts will change; luckily, shortcuts using the Ctrl button will stay the same. While the more visual, tabbed layout may reduce mouse clicks, it eats up more screen real banner's task-specific tabs attempt to anticipate and surface the functions you need according to your ongoing work. Office 12's apps get a new interface, as well as a estate and RAM. We're also wary of Office 12's goal to make the ribbon respond to the tasks you're working on. What if, say, options for text formatting that you want to fresh graphics engine, similar to that promised in Windows Vista. Visual thumbnail make are hidden because you've clicked on a graphic? Unanticipated consequences galleries of ready-made layouts suggest formatting options, and templates of your could make the ribbon less intuitive than the traditional layout of Office 2003. The live document are available automatically. new graphics muscle makes icons and charts appear less flat, but our jaws didn't To package the new features, the new default developer-friendly, XML-based file drop at first sight. formats promise to be as much as 70 percent smaller than those in Office 2003. Microsoft will tack an X onto the tail of each document extension; DOC files from Word 12 will become DOCX; XLS files within Excel 12 will become XLSX, and so on. The older DOC, XLS, and other formats will remain Save As options. Yet unlike previous versions of Office, which irretrievably mangle data when files become We like that Microsoft won't force users to buy the latest, greatest PCs. Office 12 will require Windows XP SP1 or 2003 and will require a minimum of 256MB of RAM and a 512MHz processor. However, we anticipate that you may want an even more powerful system to multitask with the graphics-intensive Office 12. corrupted, Office 12 will separate documents' contents from formatting to allow emergency recovery. Office 12 also hopes to better serve business customers with mobile connectivity and sharing of data via company servers. Outlook: Microsoft Office 12 looks dramatically different from Office 2003. The task- oriented paradigm common to the separate releases of Vista and Office 12 will be Upside: We appreciate the ability of the apps within Microsoft Office 12 (beta 1) to new to everyone. The tabbed command layout of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint may display live previews of formatting changes, so you'll never have to guess again what be a welcome change if your wrists ache from clicking through the myriad drop-down a font looks like. This system promises many ease-of-use interface tweaks, such as a menus, and Microsoft hopes that the new layout will be more intuitive. But even well- slider bar in the bottom of each window for zooming in and out of page views. We intended software changes that seem graceful at first glance might reveal quirks or hope that tabbed toolbar browsing will make navigating through tasks and hassles during extended use. In the next beta 2 test rollout of Office 12 (expected documents easier and eliminate the guesswork, as it attempts to display the tools next spring), Microsoft plans to reveal more about its server work flows for you need, such as visual galleries of attributes and suggested layouts. To spare you businesses. We also await more details on Microsoft's plans to better integrate from annoying interruptions, Microsoft hammered the nail in the coffin of the dorky multimedia communications, such as e-mail and instant messaging, within Office 12 paper-clip cartoon, Clippy. Right-clicking a mouse will reveal the same task-specific documents. Peek at the impending changes in our Office 12 slide show, as well as in menu choices as offered in the masthead banner. Developers will get the freedom to our separate previews of Word 12, Excel 12, PowerPoint 12, and Outlook 12 add their own tabs, items to tabs, and gallery items to Office 12; and companies can build their own toolbars from scratch, if needed. Old, familiar add-ins will also work in the new Office. Users of previous versions of Office will like that Office 12 files are backward compatible through Office 97.
Typical of early pre-release coverage was straight-forward reporting of the features while also expressing the concerns around change. Click to enlarge. (Source: CNET, 11/16/2005)

A more detailed expression of concern came from CNET’s editors. “In the past, Microsoft has sabotaged itself by unrolling too many new features to Office too fast. We’re keeping a lookout for problems; after all, Office 12 was in its storyboard stages just a few months ago. If you’ve spent the past two years mastering Office 2003, prepare for a steep learning curve.”3

Two page color magazine spread featuring many screen shots of Office12.
This pre-release coverage of the beta test from January 2006 was a feature story covering six pages in PC Magazine. It is fair to say “Extreme Makeover” probably did not translate well internationally though it reflected the then popular home remodeling show. (Source: PC Magazine, January 2006, personal)

These articles generated the MYR feedback. The enterprise account managers, essentially all our revenue except for Japan, were on the verge of freaking out. They saw the Ribbon as pure friction in the way of revenue and nothing less. They cited doubts expressed in the articles, reprinted in every language around the world, as evidence of deep concerns over the direction Office was taking. They did not want to spend energy selling Office where the assumption was we’d already won. They wanted to focus on selling the big server strategy, where we were losing to open source Linux and a host of smaller competitors. So why put up a barrier, they asked.

On the left is an advertisement featuring people talking about work with Dinosaur heads. The copy reads "Microsoft® Office has evolved. Have vou? After all. the wav we work has changed. Today, information is simply everywhere. Once it leaves your hands, anything can happen. That's why the latest version of Microsoft Office includes Information Rights Management technologies. Now you can put limits on the printing, copying, or forwarding of sensitive e-mail and documents. It's time to evolve the way you work. Discover how at microsoft.com/office/evolve I think it's time to upqrade our Office 2000. I'm down with that". To the right is a blog post critical of the ads, reading: Microsoft Thinks We're Dinosaurs I agree with Mr. Scoble, who in February agreed with Mr. Dvorak, that Microsoft's marketing sucks. The latest stinker is their new Office evolution campaign. You might have caught the 3-page ad in PC Magazine or Wired. This unfortunate waste of marketing resources succeeds in making three bold points: 1. Our software sucks, so buy more of our software. The ad begins by pointing out that our teams are "out of sync", our information is "out of control", and our people are "out of the loop"! Oh my! How did this happen?! Oh, because we continue to use the Microsoft Office software we purchased awhile back. We still have Office 97. I thought we were feeling a little behind the times. What about Office 2000 or 2002/XP? Are those products, recently purchased and rolled out, also allowing our businesses to fall down around us? How come they didn't tell us their software sucked back when we bought it? 2. We're evolving, why aren't you? Oh, I don't know, probably because we sent you all of our money for your last product. Note to Microsoft: Touting you ability to evolve and improve using my hard earned cash, while questioning whether I have the brains to do the same, hardly inspires me to send you more money. 3. You are a dinosaur. Buy our latest Office product, or go extinct. Could Microsoft have been any more disrespectful? Let's see, dinosaurs, which they clearly believe we are, evoke for me the following characteristics: o dumb o dead Well thanks for that.
An example of the “Evolve” (aka “Dinosaurs” campaign). To the right is an example of the kind of blog posts and comments written at the time, including in The Economist, but I chose this more casual reference. (Source: Personal, and ewbi.develops, 3/22/2005, https://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/03/microsoft_think.html)

As if to highlight these enterprise customer concerns even more, in the spring of 2005 Office marketing rolled out worldwide a series of advertisements as a follow-on to the “Great Moments” campaign previously described. Attempting to inject humor into the extremely enterprise Office 2003 wave and to encourage customers to digitally enable knowledge workers, marketing developed a new advertising campaign affectionately called “Dinosaurs” though formally called “Evolve.” These ads featured humans in the office but with oversized, cartoonish dinosaur heads, implying those who have not yet embraced a digital workstyle including running Office 2003 were dinosaurs. In other words, we called nearly all our customers dinosaurs. At least the ads were popular in Japan, a market known to appreciate a good mascot, where the company distributed a large quantity of small plastic dinosaur heads.

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