Here’s the problem: Microsoft Office was built in a world before internet. A world where you write a document, you edit a document, and then you publish it by printing it, and its existence continues as a static piece of paper in the real world. But the document itself is a narrow representation of the project or initative it represents. The first step was to acknowledge that documents are living breathing things that evolve and represent ideas that evolve and have context. This part has been solved, as Google docs and Microsoft Office both now support storing the document in a cloud which enables real-time collaboration, live updating, and tracked changes. However the true vision for productivity should be to represent the project holistically in one place. The document is just one piece of a project or initiative. The rest of the project exists as Emails or Skype messages that communicate metadata like the document’s current status, stakeholders, and updates. As well as other related documents. How can we move toward a more holistic approach to collaboration?
I don’t want to create the document on my PC and then upload it to some group Workspace, SkyDrive, or SharePoint where it can be shared & edited by others. And I don’t want one program for managing emails, another for managing documents, another for slide decks, another for managing workspaces, another for notes, and another for IMs. I want to stop managing documents and start managing the project itself. The document should live in the group workspace to begin with. And the emails pertaining to that project should live there to. I should see a Workspace newsfeed that lets me know who has edited the documents, what new documents have been created, threaded emails, and relevant information on IMs, notes, meeting requests, tasks, meeting recordings, wikis, and blogs. And none of this should need to be uploaded to the workspace. It should all live within the workspace. So that I’m managing my project or my team, not my documents & my emails.
Predictions
Today Google updated its Google Apps adding more Office-like functionality. It also unveiled a new intranet platform based on JotSpot which they acquired, and which has the potential to work similarly to SharePoint. The biggest thing holding Google back from widespread adoption is the user perception that things on the internet are impermanent. That a website is static, temporary, and can evaporate at a moment’s notice taking your content with it. But AJAX is slowly changing this perception. And Windows Presentation Foundation/Silverlight, and Adobe AIR/Flash will soon take that a step further.
For Google, the transformation will be complete when Google one day soon announces that all of its Google Apps now work on Google Gears. While this platform is slowly being rolled out, we’ll see other teams at Google incrementally improve Google Apps features, so that by mid-2008, Google may have achieved parity with Office on the 20% of features that represent 80% of the value for most users. And then we’ll be in for a real race.
At that point, Office 14 will still be 1.5 years from shipping, which will give Google 1.5 years with a solid offering and little competition to take market share, win credibility with larger enterprise customers, so that when Office 14 ships, many enterprises may question if it’s worth the cost to renew Office company-wide.
And then the game will finally become purely about who is more innovative in solving the user’s pain. The only problem is that a rich-app seems to take 3 years to ship, while a web-based-Google-gears-supported-app can be refreshed at any time and gets the best of both worlds – the agility of constant experimentation, innovation, and marginal improvements with the capabilities of a rich app.
What I Would Do Differently
1. When Silverlight 2.0 ships in the next month, Microsoft should turn its attention to building their own version of Google Gears on the WPF/Silverlight platform. Like Google Gears, allow 3rd party developers to use it as well.
2. Microsoft can’t afford to wait for the multi-year ship-cycle of Office 15 to start innovating. Creating web-based-versions of the Office suite is critical. I think we all know it. But to really start compete, Microsoft is going to have to go even further than shipping web versions, they’ll need actually make web the default and the rich-app secondary. This would be a tremendous cultural shift for the company. But by driving all the energy & innovation through the web-based versions we can ship incremental improvements continuously, then package them up as rich-app versions every 2-3 years.
3. Next, Microsoft should open up the APIs on these web-based apps and allow 3rd party developers to build add-ons. The value in the platform has always been in the ecosystem. Microsoft’s rich-app ecosystem has plateaued but there’s tremendous potential to move those existing developer relationships to cloud-based productivity apps.
4. Compete. And may the best one win.