The Wall Street Journal and why 'rebooting Microsoft Office' is not an option
Call it the "curse of runaway success". Over the past 20+ years, Microsoft's Office suite has grown from a laughable also-ran in a market dominated by Lotus 123 and WordPerfect to become the dominant productivity platform for both personal and professional computing. Along the way, it has picked up a plethora of sophisticated features and obscure developer plumbing that makes it one of the most complex code bases ever deployed on a PC -- second, perhaps, only to the Microsoft Windows operating system upon which it runs.
No question, the Office of today is an incredibly intricate bit of software. So when casual users, like the Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler, call on Microsoft to "reboot office" -- ostensibly to make it easier to use in a particular workflow context (e.g. collaboration) -- they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of just what Office is and how difficult it would be to make any wholesale changes to the product.
Simply put, Office has grown too big to be rewritten in any significant way, a fact that Microsoft’s own programmers seemed to tacitly acknowledge when they released a series of limited function Mobile apps to the Windows 10 Store earlier this year. These Universal Windows App (UWA) versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint bear a superficial resemblance to their older Office 2016 cousins. However, under the hood they are completely different products.
Whereas Office 2016 carries forward years of legacy Win32 (i.e. native Windows) code, Office Mobile apps are written from the ground up using Microsoft’s new UWA development model. This new approach to app development incorporates copious amounts of managed code and a completely revamped user interface rendering model based on what Microsoft calls the Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). The net result is that the Mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are much "lighter" in terms of the compute resources (CPU, RAM, and particularly, disk space) required to run them. But it also means that they’ve jettisoned much of the legacy code base that has undergirded Office for the past two decades, including the aforementioned developer plumbing.
This last part is what many casual commentators, like Mr. Fowler, seem to overlook when they suggest that Office needs to be "rebooted". He complains about the hassle of having to answer various security prompts when opening a shared Office document, not realizing that those prompts are in place for a very good reason. Every data file that Office 2016 opens is a potential threat vector thanks to the extensive programmability and scripting features built into the suite’s component applications.
Powerful developer technologies, like Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE/COM), are readily available across the legacy Office applications family. These technologies give in-house programmers the tools they need to script sophisticated workflow solutions that leverage the full range of capabilities in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
This is why Microsoft often refers to Office as a "platform": It includes a vast, internal coding playground that allows for extensive customization and automation of the end-user experience. The corresponding programmatic interfaces are what give legacy Office it’s enterprise computing power, but they also create an environment in which simple tasks, like opening a document, could expose the platform to potentially malicious code (VBA macros are typically stored alongside user generated content in Office data files).
So safeguards must be introduced, and these often manifest themselves as additional verification steps when navigating the Office user interface. By contrast, simplistic, online-only productivity solutions, like the Google Docs product that Mr. Fowler seems so enamored of, need no such safeguards since they lack the kind of extensive plumbing and access to local resources that make Office such a powerful development tool. Likewise, the Mobile "app" versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint are similarly devoid of legacy programmer plumbing -- and the associated security concerns -- a fact that will ultimately undermine Microsoft’s mobile-first strategy as it pertains to Windows 10 Mobile and its Continuum feature (i.e. if it can’t run VBA, it isn’t really "Office").
Bottom Line: Microsoft Office is an extremely complex platform, and any calls to reboot, rewrite or otherwise overhaul its code base suggest a fundamental ignorance of the product’s history and just what it is that makes Office so powerful in the enterprise. Rather than critique Office 2016 for being sophisticated and restrictive (both positives as far as big business is concerned), casual users, like Mr. Fowler, should try out the Mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint as they might better satisfy their less demanding productivity requirements.
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