Which is also why it is surprising that Microsoft has spent so little time on office in 20 years. Outside of changing the colors regularly, there has been very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016. And opening the VBA IDE is a nasty reminder.
I'd argue large companies are still running Windows because of Office. The cost of retraining people, redesigning all of these user processes and converting all those documents would be massive. Whereas most new corporate applications in the last 5 years have been mostly web based.
So I am surprised Microsoft under-invest in what is they main strategic lock-in in the juicy enterprise market.
> very few new significant functionalities between Office 2003 and Office 2016
The first release to feature the Ribbon, arguably one of the all-time major changes in Office, was 2007. That took quite a bit for most users to get used to.
An Office suite is not where you add experimental features for the hell of it. People use it to get the job done in so many different scenarios, any change will significantly impact entire industries.
Office programs are the "lawyers" and "accountants" of the software world: their work has been more or less the same since they existed, and any major change to them is a basically societal upheaval, so their approach will always be naturally conservative.
Reshuffling buttons when they added ribbon is what I would classify as "changing the color", not really a new functionality.
There are many things lawyers, bankers, consultants and accountants would need that Office doesn't do. Linking a spreadsheet to a powerpoint document is a nightmare right now. Linking spreadsheets between them too. There should be a way to express a UDF as a spreadsheet so that people who can't code could create their own UDF. I love Apple's Number canvas approach, where a sheet is not a grid but a canvas on which you can add grids or charts, and they overflow with a scrollbar. Etc.
There are lots of new functionalities they could add that would make people's life better. Instead these products barely evolved in 20 years. Click the "fx" button in excel 2016 and you will get the same non resizable dialog box with a tiny listbox and a search box that doesn't search anything than in Office XP.
If you think about it, only 20% if employees can use office at a medium to high level anyways - a lot less people to retrain. The rest are "I click this button then do this thing"
Well, I guess that explains why you care about Office in 2017.