Mixed Results at OfficeMax
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There's still work to do if the former Boise Cascade is to make its mark.
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Microsoft Office, software for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations, is seeing its growth slow. Microsoft isn't pleased.
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(InfoWorld) - Many corporate IT managers have voiced concerns that the dramatically different user interface in Microsoft's new Office 2007 software will force them to undertake more carefully planned migrations than they've had to do in the past, with an increased amount of end-user training. But Chris Capossela, corporate vice president of the product management group in Microsoft's Business Division, insists that companies won't have to devise "some big sophisticated training plan" to roll out Office 2007. During an interview at Monday night's Windows Vista and Office 2007 launch event in New York, Capossela said IT departments can find plenty of freely available interactive training materials on Microsoft's Web site. Excerpts from the interview follow. CW: Many IT managers say they'll have to do more strategic planning for their Office 2007 rollouts because of extra training time that needs to be built in for users. What would you say to companies that are concerned about that? Capossela: Well, we certainly didn't do this lightly. We've been working on how to do this as well as we could for the past three years. We started by unveiling the new user interface many, many, many months ago to make sure people understood there was a big change coming. And then we did dramatically more end-user testing than we've done on any other piece of software. So I would say to any of the corporations that are considering this: you should know that we've tested this thing incredibly deeply to make sure that your average Office user is going to get up and running very quickly. And the feedback we're getting is that it's far less of a concern than people think it will be initially. There are two data points that we talk about. No. 1 is, for your average Office user, we see that it takes them about two days of working with the product before they say, "I'll never go back." For your power user -- the people who know the ins and outs of Excel, maybe the finance team, or the legal team when it comes to Word -- it takes them more like two weeks before they'll say, "Please don't ever take this away." And that was a little bit counter to what we first thought. We thought the more casual user would be more scared, and instead, it actually turned out to be the more die-hard user, because they know exactly where everything lives in the old version. So it takes them longer. But that's not two weeks of no productivity. That's two weeks before they say, "I'll never give this product up." When they launch the product for the first time, we've designed that very first ribbon so that the vast majority of the common things are right there. There's no hunting around for it. It's literally easy to see: how do I change a font, how do I print a file, how do I open a file, how do I save a file. CW: For those who haven't looked at Office 2007 yet, can you describe the ribbon? Capossela: The ribbon takes the place of menus and toolbars. You used to have menus that dropped down and toolbars that stacked up on top of each other. Now the ribbon is one strip of icons and galleries that you can choose from to author your documents. The vast majority of people -- something like 85 percent of our beta users -- said they were going to be far more productive with [Office] 2007 than [Office] 2003. The other thing we set up to do was to not put the training burden on the shoulders of the IT staff. We really wanted to build the training right into the product and connect that to the Web, where we have really rich training materials. The No. 1 guide I point the IT staff to is something called the interactive guides. There's an interactive guide for Word, for Excel, for PowerPoint. The interactive guide is on the Web, and it lets a user point to their favorite menu item or toolbar item in Word 2003 in a little Web page, and then we play a little video that shows how you do that exact thing in Word 2007. It's essentially a transition tool that you can use. And IT doesn't have to roll anything out. If you hit help within Office, within the product, you get access to that training material. CW: So you don't think IT departments need to build in any training, period? They can just rely on your Web site? Capossela: Absolutely. The best thing for them to do is just take a set of users and do a pilot, where they take a group, a department, and roll out Office 2007. Obviously, do it to a small enough group that IT is going to feel comfortable supporting it and see what kind of support they need for the new user interface. I think people will be very surprised that it's far less jarring than you might think. And again, we credit that to the user feedback that we got in building the product itself. CW: To sum up, then, you think the fears of IT pros about the need for more extensive training are unfounded? Capossela: I think they're rational to be concerned, and planning is a good thing. But all the data we have shows us that it is something that is much, much simpler than you at first think when you hear that the user interface has changed. CW: You said that user feedback has been far more extensive than ever before. By what magnitude? Capossela: Certainly with the focus groups and the usability tests, where we are literally bringing people together and we're watching them and talking to them, etc., I'd say that we've probably done an order of magnitude more than we've ever done before. But the thing that was really the breakthrough this time around was the instrumentation that was built right into the product. When you were using the beta of Office 2007, we were, with your permission, tracking all the things that you were doing with the mouse, all the commands that you were using. And that data was getting sent back to us so that we knew how long people were spending doing certain tasks. That's something we've just never been able to do on this type of scale before. We'd never had 3.5 million people downloading the beta and playing with that. The numbers are just absurd compared to what we've had in the past. We did 600,000 downloads in two days of the beta, and that was more than we had for the entire [Office] 2003 beta cycle. In two days. The vast majority of [beta testers] were sending information back to us, and that's how we got the 1 billion sessions that were tracked. We've just never done anything of that scale before. CW: Do you have any demographic information about the pool of testers? Capossela: It was a mix between consumers, small businesses and corporations. And it was all over the world, because we did the beta in many, many different languages. So it wasn't like it was a financial services thing in New York City. It really was incredibly broad because the download was available for anybody. CW: Did you ask the testers for any information about themselves? Capossela: A little bit of data, but we don't force a lot of profile information. Otherwise, people aren't going to be more likely to play with it. For us, it's not that important to know women between the ages of 24 and 32 beta-tested it. For us, it's just, "Hey, the more beta testers we can get, the more representative that is of the 500 million people that use the product." CW: Are you getting any feedback on the new default file format -- Office Open XML? Capossela: I think it's going to be something that corporations take different approaches on. Some companies, I think, will want the improved security. They'll want the more compact file size. And they'll want to know that they're archiving data in a format that is completely open and that 100 years from now, they won't need a copy of Word to get into one of those files. Then there are corporations that are going to say, "You know what? This is going to take us some time, and we're going to turn the default back to the binary formats because we know those binary formats will work with everybody who has older versions of Office, without them having to download a patch. So, we are going to take a more cautious approach." Some of it depends on what is important for the corporation itself. If they're worried about security attacks against the binary formats, XML is far and away the best way to get secure because that file format was built as a much, much more robust format. It's much harder to break into that format. CW: Isn't it only a question of time before the hackers figure out how to break into it? Capossela: With any piece of software, it's just a matter of time, if somebody wants to dedicate their life to do something like that. But I think it gets a lot harder. It's a little like piracy. Do you do nothing because there will be pirates out there? Or do you do things to really stop the casual pirates, stop the casual hackers [and] make it as hard as you possibly can for people to break into your applications. That's certainly what we're doing. CW: How tough is it to revert back to the binary formats? Capossela: It's a single switch in the Options dialog that says, for my default format, I want to use the binary formats instead of XML. It takes me about two seconds to do it on any machine I walk up to. IT, of course, will do that before they roll Office out. So it's not like you have to go do that to every machine.
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With two new office suites going free, can Microsoft maintain its high price tag on Office?  Don thinks it can -- and will.
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Its latest results might be a surprise because of the challenges the company has faced this year.
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2004 didn't turn out as Tribune expected, but the company may be barking up the wrong tree as it seeks to bolster results.
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Firm may be facing greater difficulties than previously thought in getting hold of chips to power its high-end PCs.
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Courier delivers mixed messages on its earnings expectations.
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Investor's Business Daily - Offices still lag homes when it comes to wireless networking, or Wi-Fi. But they're catching up.
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OfficeMax Inc , the nation's third-largest office supplies retailer, posted a higher quarterly profit on Tuesday, helped by lower expenses and improved margins.
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The office equipment maker cited cost controls and growth in equipment financing and services, though its outlook for the first quarter was partly below Wall Street expectations.
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Maxim Pharmaceutical's Ceplene produces disappointing results.
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Sales rise, but earnings and margins are on the fritz.
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Annual results show a drop in profits despite better efficiency.
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Mike Potter (from Adobe) has issued an invitation for all PHP and Ruby developers attending the MAX Conference to track each other down, as well as him.   I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.   He suggests using the entry's comments to help coordinate the meetings. The Early Bird pricing is still in effect for the conference, so there's no time like the present to reserve your spot.
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The effort to dominate their way into a de facto standard isn't sitting well with rivals HP and Dell.
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Bayer unveiled a mixed set of second-quarter results, with operating profit beating analysts' expectations although bottom-line earnings stagnated and the pharmaceuticals division continued to cause headaches for the German maker of Aspirin.