At the official Vista launch yesterday (UK version) Microsoft’s UK Managing Director Gordon Frazer called the launch of Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 Microsoft’s “biggest launch to business ever,” following up with further extravagances such as “a new era in business computing.”

Clearly these launches are exceedingly important to Microsoft, but I doubt they will prove the most significant in its history. Maybe that honour should go to Windows 95, which saw off the threat from OS/2, or maybe Excel 5.0 and Word 6.0 in 1994, which as I recall was the end of serious competition in spreadsheets and word processors until the Sun-sponsored Open Office in 2002. Or maybe the arrival of Microsoft .NET in late 2001, which has proved a remarkably successful answer to Java for server-side computing.

Success for Vista will be more about maintenance than breaking new ground. Success will be persuading businesses to upgrade from XP, or dissuading those with Windows fatigue from switching to the Mac. Office is the same. I mostly like the bold new user interface in Office 2007, though I’m suspicious of Microsoft’s motives, but where can you go when you already dominate the market? Staying still will be a big achievement.

That said, I am impressed with what Microsoft is doing with SharePoint, its portal technology. At the launch we were shown how this can aggregate diverse sources of information. I consider business mashups behind the firewall to be a big growth area, and SharePoint is well-placed to benefit.

What about Vista? It’s a decent product, but I’m anticipating much anguish in the first months after its launch. Two reasons: drivers, and UAC. Many drivers for Vista are not yet done, many will never be done. Users will try to upgrade and find stuff does not work, or even worse their systems will not be stable. They will blame Microsoft, and Vista will have to live down a bad reputation. Then after a year or so the drivers will be there, the OS will have had a few fixes, and the world will realise that it is actually pretty good.

The second reason is UAC (User Account Control), the new security feature which means users run with reduced privileges most of the time. UAC is a genuine step forward in security, but breaks many applications. Some will turn it off and lose the security benefit, others will suffer the compatibility issues. In a year or two maybe software vendors will have fixed their applications to play nicely with UAC.

I’ve been using mostly Vista for several weeks. It is more enjoyable to use than XP, but there are still annoyances which leave you wondering what its creators were thinking. For example, Vista Media Center is excellent – though I had to switch off Aero to stop it flashing – but why does the music library apparently forget its index from time to time, so all your albums disappear for a while?

Other things are just not done yet. I plugged in a SmartPhone and couldn’t figure out why Vista could only see it as a storage device. Answer: Windows Mobile Device Center is still in beta, and has to be downloaded separately.  

Little things perhaps, and your annoyances will be different from mine, but they spoil the overall effect. And if I were running a business network, I would leave it at least six months before rolling it out.

Overall I still think .NET Framework 3.0 is more significant than Vista or Office 2007, though it was hardly mentioned yesterday. It includes, after all, the two remaining “pillars of Longhorn”: Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation. It is these that may support Microsoft’s platform through to the next generation of applications, even though they were invisible at yesterday’s event.

Fascinating post from Developer Express CTO Julian Bucknall about Microsoft’s new ribbon license scheme. Developer Express is a well-regarded vendor of components for .NET and Delphi developers. It’s an ambivalent post. Bucknall states that his company has signed the license, though he expresses some frustration at its restrictions:

Lurkers and active members of our newsgroups will have noticed that we’ve been downright evasive about our plans for enhancing our ribbon implementations. We’ve been asked for some very reasonable enhancements, such as docking the ribbon vertically or along the bottom edge of the application window. Well, now you understand our ambiguous replies: according to the license agreement we are prohibited from doing most of them.

He adds that:

…you, our customers, are not covered by our license agreement with Microsoft. The terms of the license are not transferable in that way: despite the fact that you are using our components, you will have to sign the Microsoft license yourselves for your own applications.

Should you sign? Although it is royalty-free, the agreement is not without obligations. As Bucknall notes, it includes “the Office UI Design Guidelines that describe, in almost excruciating detail, how the ribbon and its associated controls must work and must look in an application in order to satisfy the license.” Signing the document means agreeing that you are making use of Microsoft’s intellectual property, and also limits what you can do with the UI.

On the whole I’m in favour of UI standards, but this seems rather extreme.

I am not a lawyer but let’s recall that the matter of copyright in the look and feel of a user interface has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy. Some may dispute the necessity of signing an agreement with Microsoft in order to create a ribbon-like UI for your application.

This feels like part of a new and more aggressive IP strategy from Microsoft, tying in with other recent moves like the Novell agreement. It’s playing with fire.

Microsoft is generously allowing developers to use its ribbon UI, as seen in Office 2007, in their own software. But is this really so generous? Here’s the key proviso:

The license is available for applications on any platform, except for applications that compete directly with the five Office applications that currently have the new UI (Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access).

It raises the interesting question: to what extent is the new UI in Office 2007 a ploy to counter Open Office? The truth is that many users cannot easily tell the difference between Microsoft Office and Open Office. They look similar. The new ribbon UI has two advantages for Microsoft:

• It looks distinctively different from other Office applications out there.
• Microsoft believes it has legally enforceable copyright in the new UI, extending to “both design and functionality.”

Why no menus in Word and Excel?

This may be the reason for another issue I’ve been puzzling over. Why is there no option to display a traditional menu in Office 2007? The reason is not technical. All the old keyboard shortcuts in Word and Excel still work, even the Alt combinations that access the menu. It is as if the menu is a ghostly presence.

I recall asking about this at the last PDC, when Office 2007 was unveiled. Microsoft said that providing a menu would stand in the way of users adopting the new UI. In other words, they would use the menu out of habit and never properly migrate to the new and presumed better way of doing things. But I wonder if this is also part of the legal strategy. With the menu in place, Word and Excel would look less distinctive; the ribbon would come over more like a fat toolbar, rather than a major new UI innovation.

Let me add that I would undoubtedly enable menus in Word and Excel, if they were available, as I have done in IE7. To me, toolbars are primarily shortcuts to commonly used features (I make an exception for the palettes in drawing and design applications). Menus on the other hand offer in-depth access to the full functionality of the product. Menus are efficient because they drop down when you need them, and collapse to a single line of screen space when not in use.

Would Microsoft have provided menus, at least as a compatibility option, if it were not so keen to look different from Open Office and enforce its IP?

A risky strategy

Removing the Office menus is a risky strategy. I’ve been using the new Office since the final code was made available, and it is disorientating. I’m intrigued and want to persevere to see if the ribbons really are more productive; but I’m not sure that the average Word or Excel user will take to it easily. Some at least will react against it and want their old Office back. If Microsoft is really unlucky, it could even serve to drive Open Office adoption, rather than preventing it.

On one level, I applaud Microsoft for taking some risks with Office 2007, after years of conservative upgrades. I’m keeping an open mind about the productivity benefits of the new UI. However, I doubt anyone would welcome the idea of the ribbon UI becoming an industry standard owned by Microsoft, and used specifically to prevent competition in office applications. It also strikes me that there are risks for developers who sign up for the “free” UI license. What if at some future point Microsoft said you are competing directly with Office?