Joe Wilcox Hard Quotations

When you introduce something new, it disrupts, and this increases things like help desk costs and employee downtime. So, to get to the benefits that come with this, they have to get past whatever retraining will be needed around the new user interface and any hardships around the new file format, which are always disruptive. These are two big hurdles Microsoft has to get around.

Microsoft is caught between a rock and a hard place. It does not want to be dependent on a major rival but on the other hand, Overture provides a significant amount of MSN's revenue.

My concern is that Microsoft has introduced too much complexity, making more difficult the arduous purchase decision process. Microsoft is right to get information out earlier, because evaluating an Office purchase will be much harder for businesses this release cycle compared to Office 2003 or XP.

But it's hard to get excited sometimes when your company delivers increasing revenue quarter on quarter, yet you read hype about Apple and their products and they get all the buzz.