An Idea for Microsoft Office

While I appreciate the functionality of Microsoft Office, I'm constantly frustrated by how bloated it is. It seems to me that most of the features that are found in Office are a complete waste of my hard drive space.

Some people say that Microsoft has to add all of these features because they have such a wide range of clients and all of their needs are different. As soon as they leave one of those obscure features out, they'd get complaints from the few who use them.

I started posting this idea on Sven's site (in his post that was linked to me, no less) and realized that I really ought to put it on my own site. So, here's the idea:

MICROSOFT SHOULD LEARN FROM MOZILLA!! (Sorry for the yelling, but Redmond is a long ways from northern Illinois) I love Mozilla Firefox. I use it on both Windows and Macs. I prefer it over Internet Exploder (big surprise) and even over Apple's Safari. One of the best features of Firefox is that they only include the basics (tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker, etc). If there are functions that I want in a browser that are a bit more advanced, I don't look for a more full-featured browser, I simply go to mozilla.org and look through the extensions. The features that I want to add, are then added. The features I don't need, I don't add. Did you know there is even a Bible verse lookup extension? Surfing the net and suddenly think of a Bible verse but don't know where its found? Simply type in the key phrase on a bar in your browser and there it is. The number and variety of extensions is simply amazing.

So, what would this look like from Microsoft? Simple. Give me a very basic word processor (for example), only the basics (bold, italics, underlining, paragraph indents, etc). If I want other features, I simply browse through the available extensions to add those features (for example, mail merge). Now, I'd be truly shocked if Microsoft would offer them for free (there is a reason why Microsoft's initials on the internet are: M$), but make them low cost, $5 for instance. Of course, since Microsoft would be selling a basic version of the software, that would cost a lot less to start out with too. In fact, Microsoft could actually start this very easily by simply using...Microsoft Works! They hand that out so freely, yet they could make a bundle if they'd sell extensions to add functionality that people wanted.

That's my two cents, anyway.