Office 2007, the Playstation 3 of the Office World
Since the Super Nintendo, I haven’t played video games a lot, except for Super Smash Bros Melee on the GameCube. Since the announcement of Nintendo Revolution, now called Wii, I closely followed the news of the gaming world. Wii is going to be sold at 250 USD, Xbox 400 USD and Playstation 600 USD.
The high price of the PS3 can be explained by a bunch of features that nobody will use everyday when the console is released or even one year from the release date. By the time those features are spread everywhere, either the PS3 will be cheaper or there will be a new better console, so there really are no good enough reasons to spend 600 USD on a PS3.
As for the Xbox 360, it was release last year a month before Christmas. I never touched one, but apparently, people love the Xbox Live feature. A real sense of community there.
Wii will change the gaming world. It was a hit at E3. It’s not even released yet and it’s beating the crap out of Microsoft and Sony. They are so severely bruised that they both seek an alliance with Nintendo. They both said that people would have a Wii as a first choice for gaming and their respective console as a second unit. Nintendo is getting the best kind of victory there is: victory with the respect of competitors and enemies.
Now, onto the main topic. Last month, I said Nobody needs to install Word and talked about a few alternatives for writing, using spreadsheets and making presentations without the requirement of installing anything. The greatest advantage was/is the ability to work anywhere with a computer with an internet connection.
Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Office 2007 have in common the fact that the price is incredibly high. In my article last month, my basic idea was that it was stupid to spend over 100 USD just to type texts. Well, Office 2007 is going to cost 679 USD. I could get one incredibly good computer for that price or even cheaper. I could even get a laptop at that price.
If you add about 20 USD to that, you can get yourself a Mac mini. That’s an attractive idea.
Imagine all the things you can do with 679 USD. You can read the things I thought about doing with only 130 CAD.
With such a horrible price tag, people will look for alternatives to Office 2007.
- They will either stick with their current version of Office or whatever else they use.
- They will look for one of the free solutions like OpenOffice or simply go online to use one of the services I have talked about avoiding all the hassle of dealing with files all over the place.
- They could also simply download Office 2007 illegally or buy a very cheap cracked version (who does that?).
It really makes no sense to pay for things you don’t use. I am not talking about you not using Word, I am talking about you not using 99% of Word and maybe 99.9% of the whole Office Suite.
By the way, I haven’t used it, but I have seen Office 2007 and read about it. It’s very slick and completely different in looks and features from previous versions, but it’s still not worth buying.
In an office, imagine how much a company can save on licenses by doing usual office work legally online.
