I’ve been in a real quandary lately about staying with the old or trying the “latest, greatest” new thing.

For example, should I stay with my trusty, productive Palm Treo 700p or get the “cool” new iPhone? This excerpt from my letter I sent to the President of Palm last year sums up part of my feelings:

Friends and co-workers all have flocked to the iPhone and constantly say, “Have you seen this thing? It’s the greatest thing ever! It’s so much better than your Palm.” I look at the iPhone and get dazzled by the form-factor and the display. The “just swipe your finger across the screen; try turning it!” functionality is kind of cool. However, things quickly fall apart when I ask, “Show me its business productivity tools. How will this make you more effective?” People always say, “Well, it has a note pad! And, you can download other products at the iPhone store I guess. But look! You can swipe your finger across the screen! Try turning it!”

Is it really worth it to go through the pain of getting the new phone, finding, buying and downloading all the software I need just to get back to the functionality I already have? I tried something similar today with Microsoft Outlook, only to truly experience the pain and make me go back to the old.

A couple of days ago, Microsoft announced the pre-release of a “hotfix” that I’ve been chomping at the bit for. It’s an update that was supposed to increase the startup speed and responsiveness of Outlook. In addition, it has a plethora of other fixes. I jumped right on it and loaded it. Right out of the shoot, I noticed that it wasn’t any faster. (I did some time trials before I loaded the hotfix, then after). In addition, my InBox was missing all its columns in the default view, and, my custom views were also all messed up. So, “going with the new” truly was a productivity killer. I fortunately was able to uninstall it and the “old” feels really good again.

This is a tough position for a “techie” guy like me. I want to experience the “cool and new,” especially so I can advise associates and customers what new things are the right things to use – and which ones they should avoid (like the hotfix). Yet, I need my own world to remain productive so I can continue to serve the very same. I think the bottom line is will the “new” add that much more value to your life? In my phone example, the answer is still “no” (but, boy, if I could only swipe my finger across the screen!). As for Outlook, it sure seemed like the answer was “yes.” And, hopefully someday soon, the hotfix will be that.

 At the behest of my friend Blake, as well as just “getting with the times,” I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 this week.  I’m pleased to say that for the most part I’m glad I did.

I had hesitated originally; I didn’t want to learn “the whole new interface” I had read and heard about.  I was really nervous that my productivity would go down hill during this “learning curve.”  Kudos to Microsoft; I wish I had done this months ago.  The learning curve is not uphill — it’s downhill all the way!

Everything is right where you need it — when you need it — even when you are not expecting it.  The new toolbar, now called the Ribbon, has everything in easy view and right where you need it.  It’s like they re-designed the dashboard of the car for the driver.  When you highlight text (in Word), a new toolbar automatically pop’s up with font formatting options — no longer do you have the make the long trek up to the tiny toolbar buttons (or right click and get a popup to fumble around with).  Doing my work in Word and Excel this week has been much more productive.

Outlook (the application I live in and work with everyday) also has benefited from similar enhancements.  The Ribbon is there when you are composing emails.  If you use add-in’s like Foresight* or Speedfiler, the Ribbon gives you more options than you had in Outlook 2003′s toolbar — making working with email more effective!  The benefits extend to the calendar also.

The Calendar is FINALLY a calendar.  The week view has navigation buttons at the top to move through the weeks.  It always drove me NUTS using the keyboard to try to move through the weeks.  Now you just “turn the pages.”  The month calendar is the same way.  In addition, you can see where each month begins and ends (in 2003, it was hard to tell).  The look is great.  It all functions and feels much better.  There’s a lot of good here, and, a little bad.

Outlook seems to have “grown” — it acts like a larger application.  Word and Excel definitely feel a hair slower at times — Outlook is even worse.  Some of this could be to me also installing Windows Desktop Search (the jury is still out on that, but, I’m leaning towards dumping it.  For example, “Snooze Indexing” doesn’t stop it from indexing!!!) and Groove (ditto).  Also, I see a lot of left overs from Outlook 2003 (right click on a calendar item and the first time the menu pop’s up and goes away — you have to click again) – which makes me wonder how think the “new coat of paint” layer is.  Finally, almost every time I open Outlook, it says my data file has a problem.  I’ve seen some entries on the web blaming Windows Desktop Search for this — so, if I dump that, maybe that will go away.

All in all — good and bad — I’m liking it and happy I’ve switched. 

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* Before I get any comments from the “peanut gallery” about Foresight not working on Office 2007, Foresight will work if it was installed with Outlook 2003 and you upgrade to Outlook 2007.  Foresight does not work — yet — on fresh installs of Outlook 2007.  It’s coming — promise!