Office 11-- not for dummies

There's a very strange argument rumbling along in the background about the fact that Microsoft plans to produce Office 11 for NT-based versions of Windows, not for DOS-based ones. Unfortunately, commentators seem uncharacteristically incapable of spelling out the facts. To be brutally frank, any company that plans to continue running Windows 98/Me is either poor or very stupid -- to be specific, too stupid to do an RoI calculation. Now, why should anyone think for a second that a company that is too stupid to make an upgrade that delivers significant benefits (Windows 98 to Windows 2000, for example) is a viable market for an upgrade that delivers relatively minor ones (Office 11)? It doesn't make sense. Although Microsoft is giving technical reasons for its strategy -- and I am not going to argue with those -- as usual it is following the money. Unlike many of the people involved in this fruitless argument, it is far too sharp to confuse the market (which is comprised only of people ready to open their wallets) with the installed base. Sure, it might make a bunch of W98/Office 97 users happy to think that they could upgrade to Office 11 if they wanted to. But we all know that they aren't going to, so offering it would just be a waste of expensive development time.