Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003

Summary: In my opinion I think that Microsoft has done a good job with Office for small business. It has everything that I need but it priced a little too high in my estimation. Looking forward to seeing and using the new version of Office in 2006.

Summary: This is one of those typical MS products at the moment. The look and feel has improved, but I just can't see any other changes. OK, the UI has been tweaked and there are some nice graphics, pop-up's, and it does feel modern. I just can't help thinking that I'm paying a lot for not a lot.

I'm sure this sounds a little strange, but given that Open Office is free, I have difficulty justifying to myself why I would want to spend over $200 per desktop on a product that does the same thing.
Effectively it's a tariff of $200 per desktop in a small business to buy a product that comes with limited support. So that's $200 for some support? That's a lot of money for a small business which goes to mitigate part of the risk of owning the product.

My experience of every MS helpdesk call that I have made involves close-reboot-reload cycles and the odd check-the-web comment. But it does seem that experience is what MS are praying on here. If you have no experience, no IT departments, and no-one to call on for advise, then you follow the MS marketing blurb forcing you to need Office 2003.

It's quite an effective policy (after all most Outlook users are there 'by default' and not through choice).

In summary though, if you compare this to Open Office you would have to say that it looks better than Open Office, and I'm sure if you were to dig heavily into the nuts and bolts you would find a greater depth of product with Office 2003. It is expensive though and for small businesses it may appear to be the only product out there.