As part of my analysis of the Microsoft "Internet Services" memos, in ZDNet I dug into the details of what Ray Ozzie wrote about Office Live:
"Ray Ozzie's memo indicates that Microsoft is still internally questioning the approach for Office Live. Should they web-enable traditional desktop personal productivity tools like Powerpoint? A web-based Office will be - should be - a much more collaborative suite of tools than its desktop equivalent. It won't simply be a re-hash of the desktop products - because to take advantage of the two-way, open and collaborative nature of the Web, Microsoft product designers and engineers will need to re-think Office functionality.
Ray Ozzie more than anyone is certainly aware of that need, so it's interesting he pegs Office Live as a "portal for productivity". In the 90's a portal was known as a central place on the Web, where users could quickly access a variety of different services and websites. I think Ozzie may be extending the meaning of 'portal' to mean the Office Live suite of web-based tools and services.
The technologies he mentioned in the memo, RSS and XML, are often used nowadays to remove the necessity of a central portal website. With RSS for example, users can publish and subscribe to different forms of data. So with Powerpoint, the Office Live version of that tool could potentially become my portal to the Web for all presentation content that I have an interest in." [Read full article on ZDNet]
I'm interested in your thoughts on what Microsoft could do with Office Live, seeing as they don't appear to have settled on a plan yet.
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I agree with you that the notion of a portal is an odd idea.
The office of the future is going to be radically different, with Blogs and Wiki's replacing Word and some email, a whole series of new tools replacing Excel and amazing tools like Macromedia's breeze replacing Powerpoint.
Ozzie is confusing the issue of collaboration. Specifically, he is mixing up synchronous collaboration with asynchronous collaboration.
In reality,synchronous collaboration happens in meetings. Usually, face to face meetings. Those posed stock photographs of people gathering around a computer screen and pointing at something interesting. They are a fiction.
For roll-up the sleeves writing, data entry and analysis, we work alone. When was the last time you wrote an email with someone, or used the help of a buddy to build everything in a spreadsheet? Instead, you put something together, and then, later, someone else reviewed it. The problem that office workers have had until now, is that they can do all the writing and analysis they want, but they still need to turn to the IT department for help distributing that information to a large group. Blogs, Wikis and the like will change all of that.
There will be a need for centralizing some information, but mainly, that will be directory information and, of course, providing a centralized search engine.
Once that's done, it is best if everything else in the office of the future is modular, loosely coupled and of course, widely distributed.
The portal model of the 1990s looks like a hub and spoke. Every B2B hoping to make a fortune, drew the same diagram, with them in the middle. The model failed because it was too difficult to get all the people out of the ends of the spokes to play nice with one hub. People instinctively knew that wasn't going to be in their best long term interest.
The alternative to a portal is simply a set of standards. Http/Html is a good example, but so is RSS and XML. The most successful example is cash money in a free market economy. People are willing to conform to a standard, as long as the standard provides them with a wide range of options. In that context, most things will be provided as a simple service. A blogging platform service. A Wiki platform service. An authentication service. An HTML based email service..
Ozzie might be on the right track - but for the moment, it is hard to judge.
It is also hard to judge whether Microsoft will be able to move fast enough to catch up with the very wide range of companies that are going to be offering tools for the Woffice 2.0. Think Google, Adobe, Sixapart, SocialText and BackpackIt just to start.
Posted by: Rod Boothby | November 10, 2005 12:32 PM