Despite Security Vulnerability, Businesses Still Prefer Office 2007

[zakislam]

A new research study has found that over two thirds of companies are still opting to run Office 2007, which is software that Microsoft no longer supports.


Despite Security Vulnerability, Businesses Still Prefer Office 2007 : Read more

 

[dennphill]

I'm no business, but I am using the last MS Office iteration that was available as standalone (CD based) - Office 2013. (Actually MS Office Professional 2013.) Works for me. Why would I want to upgrade to a annual payment for Office, Excel, Outlook, etc.? MS is not a very smart organization in my estimation.

 

[derekullo]

No mention of Office 2010 ...

My office had this before I joined and we still use it lol.

 

[gangrel]

One issue with these numbers...of the systems with some version of Office installed, how many of them are running what version? A business has 100 computers. 95 run Office 365; 5 run 2007. Still be reported as a business with 2007.

Second point that would be interesting to investigate: how much of this is an unwillingness to retrain people, because MS tends to make so many changes for no great reason. Never ignore retraining costs. I know I always hated shifting from one version of Office to the next; finding anything was a brand new level of irritation.

 

[mavikt]

And if you don't need to run M$ products there is still Apache OpenOffice

 

[Takasis007]

In our office, many of our spreadsheets have VBA and AUTOIT macros built in. The new Office 2013 does not seem to play nice with many of them. They have to be torn apart and updated. It is time consuming. Time is money. Also most end users do not have access to many of the tweaking tools. IE. turning off this ridiculous swooshing effect when you change cells. It causes a delay and if you are coding based on timings it is a pain. Nor can they alter the eye bleeding whiteness. Each terminal is locked down pretty tight as to what each agent is able to do (600+ terminals). I can't describe the amount of swearing that goes on at the office due to going through a couple thousand records and it fails because a swoosh took an additional 10th of a second.

 

[BFG-9000]

Office 2003 was the last that came on CD, while 2007 and later actually came on DVDs. While not common, 2016 is available on DVDs and presumably the next version 2019 will be as well because not everyone has broadband. You are not even able to customize the installation of 2016 though (well, without editing a file on the DVD itself), so setup full-installs all applications on the DVD.

Removing the ability to customize has been a common theme with Office--2003 was the last that had fully customizable menus and I am still most productive with it. I thought 2007's ribbons were terrible at the time but it probably wouldn't have been a problem if we had today's high resolution monitors back then. The strange thing is 2010-2013-2016 are all much like 2007 with more text labels in the ribbon, so there is next to no learning curve updating from 2007, and thus no pressing need for extensive retraining unless one of the 46% still on 2003.

So it's mostly cost--it does what they want and newer offers no compelling new features. Office is like those Madden games where the only thing they update are the rosters--with Office, the main thing that seems to change is the GUI theme to match the latest OS. And of course defaulting to cloud everything now is truly annoying. So businesses won't upgrade until costs from security issues start to outweigh the cost of upgrading.

 

[HDB]

As a consumer: Why pay? I run Apache office.

As a company: Why upgrade if everything goes to ****.

Be patient, Microsoft, eventually our backs are against the wall.

 

[elho_cid]

I guess I'm fortunate to work in company that still uses Office 2013.

 

[berezini]

I still use old office software due to its simplicity and ease of use, i tried the new versions of office and it took me 20 minutes to find the way to center text top to bottom on a page.. its stupid how the reduced productivity to new lows with new software versions. its ugly, much more cluttered and the software stinks with security holes in the first place to exploit as if the software was specifically written to be used as blackmail in order to get businesses and users alike to upgrade to the new version.

 

[BFG-9000]

Bill Gates' XP and Office 2003 was probably peak Microsoft when it came to usability. The Ballmer era was marked by the bloated Vista and Office 2007 introducing needless UI styling changes just to be new. And in the Nadella era Microsoft decided to outdo Google spying, which must be working because Microsoft stock hit an all-time high during his reign.

 

[grumpigeek]

Office 2010 wasn't too bad, but subsequent versions have got progessively worse.
For example, in Outlook the line spacing in the folder pane has gotten progessively larger to the point of being unusable if you have multiple email accounts.

Worse still, Microsoft have completely ignored complaints about this and belligerently deny there is a problem.

So, it is hardly surprising that businesses are still using Office 2007.

 

[randomizer]

I can't describe the amount of swearing that goes on at the office due to going through a couple thousand records and it fails because a swoosh took an additional 10th of a second.

Those sound like some terrible macros. Probably a royal pain to rewrite them though.

Removing the ability to customize has been a common theme with Office

Oddly enough they're going in the opposite direction with Visual Studio. A base install of 2017 is under 1GB. That's a whole lot better than the 9GB or so for 2015.

 

[faalin]

HAHA we still have a lady at work that uses lotus 123 ver 2.2, we have version 9.8.1 but when you load the older version in it breaks every macro and no one wants to spend the time to fix it.

We also run a mix of office 2003, 2010, 2013, and 2016 with a hosted exchange server. Trying to get the company to ditch all of this for a monthly O365 bill is a hard pill to swallow for them.

 

[LORD_ORION]

Even Office365 Home is a yearly subscription. When my Office 2010 Home is dead I'll use open source before I get a yearly subscription.
MS, get bent.

 

[blazeboochie]

Wait the stats equal up to 150%...?

 

[mguerra]

First Office 2916 can be bought as license not just a subscription. Office 365 is great for businesses not large enough to host their own on-prem Exchange Infrastructure. The real reason(s) you see older version of office apps 1) cost 2) in-secure older Access DBs, Macros for Excel/Word 3) lack of time for IT departments to roll out upgrades that don't break stuff.

 

[wirefire]

This problem isn't as big of a deal for the large corporation out there. The killer is for small businesses. They are the ones that look at a $2000-3000 for a SonicWall and subscription and say... give me the cheap router that just does what I need... They look at upgrading office at $200 a head or $10 / user / mo and they all go... Why should I. Security is like backups. it isn't something tangible in day to day operations so it is hard to get people to spend money on it. But when the time comes that it causes a problem they always cry to the IT people saying "why didn't you tell me... or you didn't explain this properly...." There really isn't much to explain, you don't keep pace you roll the dice, it is that simple.

 

[palladin9479]

It's because IT departments know MS is trying to screw everyone over for money. Accounting and Finance departments tend to be heavily invested in excel macros and various other forms of shadow IT. Going to a new platform tends to break those and require someone to manually fix them, unless you pay for professional services. Even if you don't have anything that would break, MS deliberately does senseless UI and functionality changes as a way to get people to pay for their training packages, essentially using Office Automation upgrades to drive sales in the service department. Then there is the subscription model, which is designed to milk as much money as possible for the customer and pass it off as a feature.

So companies are just sticking with what they have and implementing various security measures to ensure their software isn't compromised. The vast majority of security vulnerabilities only work when the user has admin access without any form of managed system security software running.

 

[vincevdc]

I've worked at two companies that have moved from on premise to Office 365 because it's cheaper than upgrading servers and storage. The employees get the benefit of installing office on their home computers (each license supports installment no up to5devices) and the tech teams can focus on business critical activities.

 

[gaaah]

Ha, I still run Office 97... and still only use about 50% of it's capability.