April 8 2014: The end of Windows XP

[dosxuk]

It's 1 hour and 30 minutes long so you probably won't watch it, but if you really want to know the inside and out of why the ribbon was introduced, Jensen Harris went through the history of Office, introduces concepts and explained why the ribbon in the long-term was a wise change back at Mix 2008 (the old name for Microsoft's Build developers conference). http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

There's a series of blog posts from Jensen covering the same material. I don't bother linking to it anymore for people who hate the ribbon, because they're so ingrained in their world believing that Office 2003's UI was perfection embodied, that regardless of the amount of justification and data showing the ribbon to be even at least as usable, they'll deny it and ignore it. Just a waste of time on both our parts sending them to it.

[all new Phil]

I can't say I understand the hate for the ribbon. You have to adjust to it at first, sure, but it's neat and does what it needs to do.

[martindtanderson]

Part of the reason why XP hasn't been dropped completely, can be a matter of cost. Old PCs which people are unwilling to replace. For businesses and organisations, they have custom made software which runs on XP, and won't be/can't be updated to work on newer OSs.

Office is a relatively expensive piece of software, so there would be a reluctance to replace it with a newer version. I do not think it is always down to people disliking an updated interface etc.

[robschneider]

Still using it here on my desktop, actually. It will run 7, but not very well. If it comes to it, I'll just stick Ubuntu or similar on it.

As people say, it refuses to die. And it refuses to die because, 13 years on, it's still a perfectly good OS which does everything I need it to do. Why fix something that isn't broken?

[dosxuk]

Why fix something that isn't broken?

This is exactly what is happening - they're no longer fixing the broken bits and you're on your own.

[martindtanderson]

Why fix something that isn't broken?

This is exactly what is happening - they're no longer fixing the broken bits and you're on your own.

Exactly, How long should Microsoft be expected to devote resources on maintaining a 13 year old OS. Apple generally only support an OS for maybe 2 or 3 years at the most.

The problem was the 7 year gap between XP and Vista. Had Longhorn not been delayed it would have been a 3 or 4 year old OS, and people would have moved sooner. Vista was built for modern hardware, and most of the OS was built from the ground up. So would not run very well with XP hardware and drivers.

OEMs became complacent and did not get things ready, and so Vista became a sore point, and by time Win7 came out, hardware had moved forward, and Microsoft made it perform better.

I will also mention that XP has been pirated more so than other OSs (I myself used an illegal version in the early days) and so there are many not willing to pay for a version of Windows.

[madmusician]

Why fix something that isn't broken?

This is exactly what is happening - they're no longer fixing the broken bits and you're on your own.

Exactly, How long should Microsoft be expected to devote resources on maintaining a 13 year old OS. Apple generally only support an OS for maybe 2 or 3 years at the most.

Less than that these days - Mountain Lion isn't receiving (m)any security updates these days, now Mavericks is a free update (although some of the SSL insecurities were patched a month or so ago).

[cwathen]

Office would have become an unworkable from Microsoft's point of view to support two completely different user interfaces.

that's not exactly going to bother MS, who've sold hundreds of thousands of Office licences since 2007 came out.

With the different interfaces, surely it was proved to be entirely workable in that a 3rd party company carried it off pretty well? And also, with the pre-ribbon interface, there already were two interfaces in use anyway - toolbars were introduced to supplement the menu system, they were not the only way to access features. It is possible to turn off all toolbars without loosing any functionality because everything is in the menus, and equally if you turn off the menus and activate every toolbar with every button you don't lose anything either (except half your screen real estate). However in practice people used both side-by-side, the toolbars for the commonly used functions and the menus for everything else. It didn't seem particularly disjointed to switch between the two.

But I digress, I'm happy to plod on with menus and toolbars because I find Office *more* accessible that way, you're happy to embrace progress and use the ribbon because you find Office better that way. As long as we're both happy, nothing is wrong in our worlds. And of course I can't deny that newer versions of Office do have much better feature sets of which I'm a bit envious - today I was working on a project for my boss in Excel which required a lot of conditional formatting. Excel 2003 which I use only supports 3 levels of it, to get the 6 that I needed I had to resort to writing a macro. In newer versions I can just have more than 3 levels of conditional formatting which would have saved me a lot of time. Of course that's an improvement, only an idiot would claim otherwise.

However, I don't think those who don't like the ribbon can just be written off as a small group of luddites about which Microsoft could not care less. Reports into usage of Office by version are few and far between and vary wildly as it's not something as easy to track as Windows version usage is.

But the few reports that are around all point to the same thing - migration towards newer versions of Office is slow, and Office 2003 still commands a *very* respectable piece of the pie - as high as 28% by some accounts. Not at all bad for a piece of software more than a decade old.

To find some more anecdotal evidence of Office 2003's continued popularity you don't have to look any further than the Microsoft Download Center on the Microsoft website, where 'Office File Format Converters' - a patch which enables Office 2003 to read and write in the newer .docx/.xlsx/pptx formats is at the top of the list of popular downloads. This was released way back in 2007 and was supposed to be a temporary stopgap for enterprises who were partway through migrating to newer versions of Office so that their older systems with Office 2003 could still share files with users who had been upgraded.

Yet after 7 years it's still a popular download being used by the sizeable number of people who haven't moved on past 2003 despite there now being 3 newer versions released.

Surely whatever your views on this, you have to acknowledge that ribbon refusenicks are just too great in number to ignore. I doubt very much that Microsoft couldn't care less about them either - they represent a group of people who have previously parted with money for Microsoft Office (which used to be way more expensive than it is now) but haven't paid for an upgrade in over 10 years, I'm very sure Microsoft would like to get those people to shell out for Office 2013 - particularly when it isn't gaining much ground in the enterprise world, as many enterprises did a combined rollout of Windows 7 + Office 2010 and aren't looking to change again any time soon.

When Microsoft has had to backtrack with Windows 8 and will now be putting in a start menu (on top of already re-introducing a start button and allowing the classic desktop to be the main interface rather than metro if you want in 8.1) in order to throw a bone to those who won't move from older versions without being able to carry some familiarity with them, you do have to wonder if the Office 2003 hardcore will end up getting a similar bone thrown at them to get them to move on.

[dosxuk]

With the different interfaces, surely it was proved to be entirely workable in that a 3rd party company carried it off pretty well? And also, with the pre-ribbon interface, there already were two interfaces in use anyway - toolbars were introduced to supplement the menu system, they were not the only way to access features.

Programmatically, the menu's are toolbars. They are implemented the same way.

The ribbon is a completely different UI. There is zero commonality between the two. And Microsoft themselves say the toolbar / menu system was unable to cope with the feature lists of the likes of Word, so they've already ruled out keeping the old UI anyway as unsuitable.

Just because a small software company can make it their job to patch over a UI for a small number of customers doesn't mean it makes financial sense for Microsoft to do so themselves.

you do have to wonder if the Office 2003 hardcore will end up getting a similar bone thrown at them to get them to move on.

They won't.

[cwathen]

Just because a small software company can make it their job to patch over a UI for a small number of customers doesn't mean it makes financial sense for Microsoft to do so themselves.

But surely the point here is that said small software company is only offering an alternative interface to Office - not actually affecting the feature set in the product. And by offering (and successfully selling) that interface, they're directly benefitting Microsoft by getting people onto newer versions of Office that otherwise wouldn't have moved over.

So regardless of whether or not Microsoft ideologically agrees with retaining a traditional interface for those that want it, their clearly is a demand for it - and money to be made by providing it. And when Microsoft is first, foremost and above everything else, a business, surely they should be providing what their customers want, not what they want to give them?

They won't.

You probably should be correct here. But I honestly never saw Microsoft backtracking with Windows 8 in the way they have - I never thought they'd make the concessions to people who won't embrace Metro that they did with Windows 8.1 in that they provided a start button and the option to use the classic interface by default. But when they did, I truly thought that was it. Yet now they are going the whole hog and will now provide a start menu for Windows 8.1 too - essentially they've now completely withdrawn from the idea of making Windows 8 a complete departure from Windows 7 and will now provide the option for people to move without being forced to change interface.

That potential 28% of Office users who are still on 2003 after all these years represent a huge amount of revenue for Microsoft if they can make them move forward. Clearly, after all this time, they're not going to get them to like the ribbon. So from a purely business perspective, why would it not make financial sense to deliver what they want if that will make them upgrade?

[dosxuk]

So regardless of whether or not Microsoft ideologically agrees with retaining a traditional interface for those that want it, their clearly is a demand for it - and money to be made by providing it. And when Microsoft is first, foremost and above everything else, a business, surely they should be providing what their customers want, not what they want to give them?

Microsoft are there to provide what they believe to be achievable and affordable.

They don't believe the old menu/toolbar UI to be either for modern Office.

It wasn't replaced because they wanted something new, it was replaced because it wasn't working. The amount of features each version added to try and keep the UI usable demonstrates that.