Is Vista Hampering Office 2007 Adoption?

As Microsoft prepares to release Service Pack 1 for Office 2007, I’ve noticed a number of articles about the relatively slow adoption of the new Office in enterprise computing circles. Specifically, the authors of these articles point to the perceived link between Vista and Office 2007 and how the slow adoption of the former is hampering the latter.

However, the feedback I’m getting from my customers – who include some heavy hitters on Wall Street and elsewhere – is that it’s the resource requirements of Office 2007, not its link to Vista, that are keeping them from making the move. As the folks over at the exo.performance.network documented in their blog entry “What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away,” Office 2007 consumes 12x more memory than Office 2000, and many times more than either Office XP or its immediate predecessor, Office 2003. It also spawns more execution threads and is generally a much more demanding suite.

At one of our customer sites, their 2008 platform refresh – which features a Core 2 Duo-based PC running at 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM – is being driven more by the need to support Office 2007 than Windows Vista, which they may skip altogether. Their analytics folks, in particular, are clamoring for Excel 2007 since it provides a much more robust calculation engine that fully exploits multi-core computing. Unfortunately, it also chews up way more RAM and CPU, forcing them to delay deployment until they can ensure an acceptable end-user experience.

In then end, Office 2007 suffers from the same “code bloat” issues that have kept Vista from achieving significant penetration into the corporate computing space. However, unlike Vista, enterprise shops actually want Office 2007, enough so that they’re willing to upgrade their hardware to get it working acceptably. Microsoft can only hope that these same customers decide that “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander” and so choose to bring Vista along for the ride.