Scott Johnson blogged a useful link to Chris Pirillo on "Office 2003" and his, ahem, er, "singular expression of unhappiness" with it.
Turns out Pirillo was going on about Outlook, but, I'd say either way it's worth some ink and reading time to better dissect these new offerings from Redmond.
Chris P. didn't like Outlook's interface (at all. - "gack").
For my part, I am mostly interested in knowing just how good/bad is the XML support in Office, and have to admit to enjoying some bit of schadenfreude reading Taking the Pulse of XML Editing on xml.com (Oct. 1, 2003):
" Office 2003's much-reported XML support generates less fear on the part of vendors and...less interest on the part of managers."
"...every vendor who showed XML output from its tool showed XML that was vastly cleaner and more comprehensible than any XML output I've seen from Office 2003."
I'd seen something similar-ish (though not as strongly stated) from PCMag recently.
Here's simply hoping that the big gorilla "safe choice" tool (for IT, that is) doesn't become a de facto choice for XML authoring going forward.
-- Admittedly, it might be nice if things have improved to the extent that you could design a system that could take advantage of whatever MS-Word 2003 can produce for reasonably clean XML, for your more casual contributors.
But it would not be nice to learn that corporate America might be buying into the hype and coming to regard Office 2003 as the automatic choice ("nobody ever got fired choosing...") for the ubiquitous authoring tool for content in XML. Harrumph.
Wm.