Even the Office 2007 box has a learning curve
I bought a retail copy of Office 2007 today (I'm loading up the new laptop I got for the world tour, which is a Thinkpad X61s), and I must be a complete spaz, but I simply could not figure out how to open the bizarre new packaging.
Context & Ripple Effects
The post lands seven months after the New York Times judged Office 2007 sleek where its predecessors were bloated, and a year after Ed Bott catalogued the pain of switching to a new OS — so by August 2007 the question hanging over Microsoft was how much relearning its installed base would absorb. Joel Spolsky's answer, from a retail copy he bought for a Thinkpad X61s, is that the learning curve now begins with the box itself: a self-described expert could not work out how to open the packaging.
The gripe traveled the same day — Zoli's Blog picked it up under the banner "Everything on this Vista PC is an Afterthought," folding the packaging complaint into the broader Vista-era critique of Microsoft polish. That makes the anecdote less about plastic tabs than about where friction surfaces in a flagship redesign: at the cash register, before a single menu appears.
First-order effects
- Retail buyers of Office 2007 in 2007 meet the redesign's learning curve at unboxing — Microsoft's confirmed packaging change means the cost of the overhaul is paid before the software launches.
Second-order effects
- Prominent developers blogging their confusion hands reviewers and rivals ready-made evidence that Microsoft's 2007 push for sleekness traded away familiarity, sharpening the framing for the suite's holiday retail season.
Third-order effects
- If even expert users need to reverse-engineer the box, Microsoft's bet that customers will pay a learning tax at every touchpoint of a redesigned product line becomes the real test of whether radical refreshes retain a mass-market installed base.
The trend: Microsoft's 2007 redesign wave — OS and Office together — is testing how much cumulative relearning loyal customers will tolerate when familiarity is the product.