The Thrill of Another MS Office Update

A FORMER TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE’S SATIRICAL VIEW OF USELESS UPDATES

Oh! The Excitement! I can edit my Word document in the cloud! And they have added five Asian fonts that I cannot now nor will I ever read. Did I mention the “smart art” I can add in the middle of my letter to the kids? And I haven’t even gotten to Excel or PowerPoint. There is a vast group of people who don’t need all the bells and whistles in today’s software. We keep being inundated with upgrades we don’t need and forced to buy subscriptions that chunk away at our fixed incomes. We need less capable and cheaper software.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not an attack on Microsoft or their software. No. It is much broader than that. But Microsoft comes to mind most quickly when I think of software updates that, I am sure, are helpful to some of the population. But as the Boomers and the Silent Generation retire, we are stuck with the software that was critical to our careers. Today? I don’t need it, but I am stuck with it, and I have to rent it.

I will never write a technical document with footnotes, careful indentations, linked tables of contents, inserted diagrams, or photographs. I only once had to do this during my working career, and dealing with the complexities of Word drove me nuts then. I was thrilled when we hired someone who made a career of making Word do all the things it can do. Word is a bloated piece of code. To do something that should be easy, like a numbered list, can lead you down a rabbit hole. There are thousands of YouTube videos showing how to do this might indicate how unintuitive working with it is.

I doubt that I will ever again use Solver or run a multivariate regression. I taught that during my career, but that time has passed. I get lost in all the icons in Excel’s “ribbon” at the top of the screen. The last “update” just moved the four icons I actually use, and it took me hours to find them again. I need to develop a budget for the local theater group or condo association. We send the files by email. None of us uses One Drive or iCloud, or Google Drive. And if one of us does, the others do not. Everyone wants to use the technology they are accustomed to. Nobody wants to change, but they want everyone else to change. I don’t have an IT organization to train everyone, and I don’t intend to do the training myself.

The Boomers, and to a lesser extent, the Silent Generation, grew to embrace technology during our careers. The technology grew in capability as we grew. We learned how to manage the technology and, in my case, taught businesses around the globe to effectively invest in and manage IT. Now the Millennials are in mid-career. Gen-Z, the actual digital natives, have never known life without pervasive technology. They are still in the phase of “more is better.” Sensibly technology providers respond to those cohorts, saddling us geezers with the bloatware we don’t need, want, or can afford.

There is a case for less capable software. I am thinking about Office 36.5! We are still a potentially lucrative market. We live longer and more things than our parents and their generations. But our needs are different.

Even Apple, which has a reputation for delivering edited-down applications, has succumbed to adding features that have doubtful utility for our cohort. Their Numbers spreadsheet just added Pivot Tables. At least their applications don’t come in a subscription model.

Here are some ideas for your next release:

1. Set it up in a tiered fashion in your next release, with the basic version having severely edited capabilities and the subscription available to release all capabilities. Microsoft does this, but its edited version cuts out the ability to print, save, and do other basic things that feel essential.
2. Freeze the user interface. The constant changes in the interface require too much relearning. If you do that for the edited version and go wild with the subscription version, have at it. Who’s idea was it to move the navigation arrows to the bottom of the page? I want a name! Dante described a special place for them.
3. Support the software longer. Some companies support for five years, others longer. Especially for the edited versions, extend the support time.