Looks like this isn’t a good day for Microsoft software. Jason Busch from SpendMatters, The Business Blog for Spend Management, has just advised it’s readers to not “upgrade” to Office 2007. Apparently, he has spent over a day of working hours trying to achieve the same level of performance he has with Windows XP and Office 2003 on his brand new Dell laptop, with 2Gb of RAM.

Despite all his efforts, and tweaks, he hasn’t been able to even come close to the level of performance he had with the previous version of the operative system. Even simple tasks like writing an e-mail proved to be very sluggish:

Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

From my experience, when I tried the latest beta of Office 2007, I didn’t experience many performance problems on Windows XP, on Word, Excel and PowerPoint (which were the only two applications I actually “used”), however, I did and do realize that Office 2003 runs faster.

In terms of functionality I think that Office 2007 is more intuitive than it’s predecessor, the “tabbed” interface was, at least in my experience, a welcome change. But since most users were already used to the old interface, and the new version is proving to be incredibly slow and takes some getting used to, perhaps it’s better to not “upgrade” at all.