Gartner's analysts are not impressed with the changes announced by Gates and the company for the next MS Office suite, Office 12. In their opinion, the complexity of the new interface might be the factor which will limit the migration towards the new application.

Although Microsoft emphasized that Office 12 will reduce the costs, Gartner's Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans think that the IT departments will have to deal with a high number of requests coming from users puzzled by a totally different version.

In fact, Gartner believes that the companies' migration towards Office 12 will only take place somewhere in 2007-2008, after Windows Vista's launching is over.

In the same analysis, Gartner recommends the companies to thoroughly test the beta 2 of Office 12, and even recommends the conservative companies to avoid the migration to Office 12 until they are implemented by other companies.

In another study, Gartner warned that the Open XML format will also lead to migration problems.