Posts tagged as: office

David Berlind at Harvard

David Berlind's luncheon talk at Harvard's Berkman Center was interesting, but we have different approaches to predicting the future. David takes the traditional journalist's perspective of discovering who is doing what to effect change, while I try to figure out why people will adopt that change and whether they have ever made a similar decision in the past. For example, David recounted the various software, standards making, and political activities taking place in an effort to replace Microsoft Office with an open standard. While I, on the other hand, tried to find any sign of people looking for an alternative to Office. Of course Word is buggy and cumbersome, but I can't remember any time in the last few years when a real end-user has told me that they wish they could switch from Word to something else. Are they too dumb to realize they would be better off with a replacement for Word? No, I think they are too smart to waste their time looking for alternatives when they just want to get their work done. They aren't lazy, they're busy. If you want to beat Word's monopoly, you have to give people a powerful reason to switch, you can't just point out a better alternative. In marketing terms you can't just present a better mouse trap, you have to convince people that they have mice and that not getting rid of them will cause serious consequences. This isn't meant as a criticism of David. What he does serves a valuable purpose, and he certainly knows his stuff when it comes to the issue of alternatives to Microsoft. He also needs to incorporate a more market driven and historical perspective into his analysis.

I made my pitch to get David to use the term copy protection instead of DRM. He was sympathetic to the issue, but not too interested in making the change. He understands the issues of DRM so much better than I do, including the legal aspects, that he sees the problem of DRM as much greater than just not being able to move content to a new computer. He is right, but you aren't going to get people upset enough to demand change by providing more details. You need a simple hook. Maybe copy protection isn't scary enough. I'm not great at coming up with really compelling marketing terms, but I do know how to recognize them. When I find a way to describe DRM that makes people's eyes go wide, I'll know I've hit the target. If you have any suggestions for a really repulsive name for DRM, please let me know. I'll do my best to promote it.

The other shoe drops

Scoble has reported that Microsoft is releasing the Office XML spec. Exactly when and how this will be supported in Office products isn't clear, but the direction is great. It is always best to cannibalize yourself instead of letting others cannibalize you.

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

Why I'd rather roll my own CMS

Just when I was feeling silly about building my own blogging CMS I found two posts that reminded me why I like to keep my data in my own system. David Weinberger recently completed the "upgrade from hell" with MoveableType and Scoble is throwing a hissy fit over Wordpress' RSS feed. This is why I don't feel comfortable with other people managing my data. I'd rather do the work upfront than get caught later in somebody else's database.

This brings up a key problem with web-based apps. When a desktop app fails or a major bug shows up, I can at least find some product or write some code to get to the data and transfer it to some other tool. What happens when my data is in a database on some server somewhere? Of course, you have to rely on remote hosting for lots of things. I don't want the hassles of running my own webserver at my house, but I keep a complete working mirror of any site I build, including all the supporting scripts on one of my machines at home. Once my blogging system is moved to Ruby/MySQL I'll certainly host it remotely, but it will still be running my code.

The average user has to rely on other people's code, and it will take years before that trust is solid. Yes, I know that people use remote blogging systems every day, but that is still the leading edge of users. Before we all move to web versions of Office tools, a lot of thought has to be given to recovery. I'm going to assume that any reputable host will keep back-ups, even though that has been proven false also. If users discover that upgrades and new "features" cause them to lose data, there could be a backlash that sets Web 2.0 back a few years. When Word fails, people may curse, but they don't give up on Windows. If a web version of Word fails, they may decide to take their data back where they feel more control.

We need to start the feature race over again

There have been lots of predictions of online versions of desktop apps. What has been missing is a valid justification for people to move from Microsoft Office to an online set of apps. One unrecognized benefit will be the restarting of the feature race all over again. I just set up a new copy of Quicken so I could help my mother with her checkbook and the level of complexity is overwhelming. I just wanted to do simple checkbook balancing but the software acts as if I want to set up my own online brokerage house. I had the same experience the other day when I started building the system to manage this blog. I'm coding it myself with FoxPro at first and then I'll move it to MySQL and probably Ruby. All I wanted to start with was a simple flat file database of my posts, but FoxPro, Access and all the other supposedly end-user databases were so feature rich that I was faced with studying manuals just to create a form to add and edit records. A new generation of web based apps will have to start at the beginning of the feature curve and maybe some of them will stay simple enough to be used by non-power users. I don't mind programming and I like lots of features when I need them, but the current packaged software model requires publishers to constantly add features until they can do everything every competitor does. Hopefully the web model for apps will allow for different levels of complexity.