Is Office 2007 the real Office 3.0?
There's been a lot of hype in recent months about the future of the Office -- written in caps I imagine to distinguish it from Microsoft Office, which of course also being in caps is no distinction at all. Nick Carr -- he who sees no innovation in IT and other headline-grabbing nonsense -- has even weighed in with his own "stages of life" version of "Office the hyped concept", which puts us roughly in the Office 2.0 era, give or take a revision number or two.
What I find curious about these musing is that they seem to take a cue from the Web 2.0 gang and assume that all the "Office the hyped concept" innovation worth blogging about centers around the Web. Carr's Office 2.0 is all about personal productivity meets the Web, and Office 3.0 and 4.0 seem to take that theme and run it even further up the Web 2.0 flagpole.
So here's another take: the ability of Microsoft's Office suite to increasingy serve as the interface to enterprise applications -- as in SAP's MySAP and Microsoft's Dynamics -- is the real "Office the hyped concept" innovation that matters most. This capabiity to directly tie Microsoft Office savvy users -- a mere 450 million souls -- to the enterprise software that actually runs much of the global economy (as opposed to the Web, which I'm sorry to say, largely exists to help search through the outputs of the global economy) is a true revolution. This ability to make the Microsoft Office environment the interface to the global economy will make any Web/Office mashup look like the small (mashed) potatoes it really is. Office 2007, with its hooks into collaboration, workflow, portals, and other massively important functions in the enterprise, is the real revolution-to-be, and makes the low-level productivity-meets-the-web musings of Carr and others pretty insignificant.
If you poll the enterprise software vendors about what they're thinking regarding the future of "Office the hyped concept", they'll all tell you that Microsoft's Office 2007 is the one to embrace or fear the most. All the enterprise software vendors struggle mightily to sell more seats to a user base that is increasingly resistant to the kind of training that has traditionally been needed to use big enterprise software. Hence the Microsoft/SAP Duet joint adventure to make Office an interface to SAP, and Microsoft Dynamic's own efforts to blunt the success of Duet with its own Office interfaces. In both cases, after billions of dollars in "innovative" interface design, the fact that millions of users are probably most comfortable using Office has created a tremendous incentive to capitalize on that perception in the effort to make the enterprise safe for more enterprise software licenses.
The fear comes of course from giving Microsoft an even more significant seat at the table, just when Web 2.0 and other stuff -- sorry about the technical term "stuff", but "sanitary landfill" is too long -- promises to "liberate" the world from the dominance of desktop software. And so the eternal battle between Microsoft and the rest of the tech world continues.
But in the end, what Microsoft proposes doing to -- or with -- enterprise software really is going to change productivity and collaboration, much the same way that standardizing on the Office Suite has allowed all of us to exchange files without fear of reformatting and other bedevilments. So next time someone tries to sell you a list of what's new in "Office the hyped concept", think about Office 2007 the enterprise software interface and then weigh which one will have a greater measurable impact on the global economy. Nick Carr thinks the be-all and end-all of Office is a full suite of functionality on the Web, I think it's making the familiar do the work of the complex. You be the judge.