Amuyu

The much vaunted revamp of the Microsoft Office system includes a ton of new changes. One of the most important (as far as I can tell so far) is the complete revamp of the user interface. This link goes to a video where MS walks us through a high level overview of this change.

I’m excited about this, not for personal use, but because I might finally stop getting calls from everyone I know. Many of the features that make Word, Excel, and PowerPoint presentation look good are very difficult to figure out. The learning curve for all of these products is extreme, to say the least. To illustrate this, look at the size of this book. This 1172 page tome attempts to cover the features of this set of products. BUT, the Word only version is 912 pages by itself. Excel is 936 pages. No need to go on. What Office is missing is not features, but accessibility.

I hope that once we finally get our hands on this, the calls will stop (well actually, I expect a slew of calls when it first comes out because it has changed).

For those of you that don’t have a Mac, but like the look and feel, try this. The website itself is worth the visit.

It’s an amazing set of extensions, plugins, and skins that make an XP machine look and feel almost like a Mac. The almost part being the underlying OS remains the same.

I ranted and raved before on Dvorak’s prediction. One of his big arguments was that Microsoft agreed to “only” a five year office extension. Well, I found this:

Listen to the RDF on this one. Not so much distortion.

One of the most interesting things about this is how Steve acted like a patient parent explaining to children (the audience) that we need to coexist in order to survive. I wonder how much of that feeling is still there. I’d imagine it’s quite a bit.