Yesterday I posed the question whether Mac users can turn their backs on MS Office—Can Mac Users Turn Their Backs on Microsoft Office?—and then offered a companion MS Office: Love it or Leave it poll. At this point the comments and poll results don’t look good for MS Office, but I was surprised to see that both Google Docs and Open Office had strong support. As an interesting coincidence, Lifehacker put Office Online head-to-head with Google Docs with an even more interesting result: Office Online is a pretty good online office client.
While I don’t think that you can replace all of your office-suite task with cloud-based offerings (especially since at the moment my home Internet connection is down), I do think that intermixing cloud-based apps with local apps is a great way to collaborate and be able to work remotely (leaving a bulky machine at home). Could Microsoft maybe put more time and polish on their online office apps to keep them as compelling offerings?
In the end I know that realistically that all of this MS Office yes or no is just technosphere echo chamber chatter. The majority of people don’t have the time or patience to deal with quirks in using Open Office instead of MS Office (we’re talking about PC folks in this case). For Mac folks, as good as iWork is (and I am enjoying it more and more), if you realistically want to make sure that you mesh with other colleagues (unless they all use iWork) you’re going to have to go with the lowest common denominator: MS Office.
Yes, we can help people with alternative solutions, but I believe that often our well-meaning helping makes life hard for people sometimes. If you switch your friend to Ubuntu and Open Office are you willing to be the on-call tech support when something goes wrong with sending a critical proposal to a new client? The number of times I’ve had to go back and start over with a presentation or document because I thought I’d be cool and use something other than MS Office, well I’ve lost count.
Maybe the truth is that in order to improve things, we just need to keep pushing for better solutions.
