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On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 10:07:04 -0700, while chained to a desk in
the scriptorium, cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com ("Chuck Martin") wrote:
> $Microsoft doesn't like you. Neither does its stockholders. :)
Tough.
I think the office suite market is maturing, and it will become
harder and harder for manufacturers to add bells and whistles to
get people to go out and get upgrades.
It was different when the changes were larger and people could
see an immediate benefit to an upgrade.
But many applications have all the features many of their users
could possibly want--and then a ton more.
Now, I love Excel with all its neat bells and whistles. It blows
a lot of people's minds when I tell them I use Excel more than
any other application in MS Office, with the possible exception
of Outlook.
That said, I can see a lot of features in Excel that many people
really don't need. A lot of the more esoteric math functions
come to mind. Most people don't have much need for an ability to
do Bessel functions, for example.
Microsoft could add a lot more math features to Excel, but the
average user isn't going to be happy shelling out another couple
of hundred dollars for an upgrade that helps them calculate
residuals for line integrals in the complex plane. That feature
is better left to specialized software like Mathlab.
At the same time, Microsoft will have to settle for a lower
growth rate in sales for the Office Suite products.
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