Cat5bird Seat
New World of Hype
The Office 12 pitch may sound like familiar drivel, but its target may not be you, after all.
Microsoft is starting to beat the PR drums for the next version of Office.
It's "Office 12" right now, but it'll ship as Office 2006 unless
they change the naming scheme again and make it Office Fred or SuperOffice
or Office with Enzymes or some darned thing. And they just might; they
have to do something to revive Office sales. Speaking as a writer of books
for Office developers, I share in Microsoft's disappointment that many
organizations have decided to stick with Office 2000, Office XP, or even
Office 97 rather than upgrading to Office 2003.
Talk to a lot of people out in the business world and you'll find a general
perception that the existing versions of Office are good enough, that
people don't need any new features, and that there's no point in embarking
on a program of retraining and buying upgrades.
So it's hardly surprising that the Redmond hype machine has gone into
full-court press mode with a campaign centered around the "New World
of Work," including a letter from Bill Gates (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2005/05-19newworldofwork.asp),
a white paper (http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/E/4/BE40F0BC-434B-487C-B788-20052D75A3EC/NewWorldofWorkWP.doc),
an interview with up-and-coming Corporate VP Chris Capossela (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/may05/05-18Office.asp)
and sundry supporting documentation.
I love reading marketing materials. It's like eating cotton candy: You
finish and your first thought is "did I just consume something?"
But this is the stuff that Microsoft is counting on to sell thousands
of copies of Office 12 to the people with the corporate checkbooks, so
it's worth trying to figure out what (if anything) it means.
One thing has clearly come to Microsoft's attention: The existing Office
productivity applications haven't made most people's jobs any easier.
Coupled with the breathtaking rise in connectivity, Office (and its less
popular competitors) has left most information workers simply drowning
in information. The white paper I mentioned above quotes some ugly statistics:
30 percent of the day just looking for information, another 25 percent
on non-productive tasks, a ten-fold increase in e-mail since 1997, and
so on. Software has made it possible for those of us who are cogs in the
machine to move faster and work harder.
To help out, Office 12 is promising the usual laundry list of improvements:
better task management, easier mobile information access, simpler collaborative
workspace setup, better data visualization tools, central document management
standards, open XML standards, and so on. (Note how many of these were
also goals of previous versions of Office.) There's some other stuff in
the white paper and executive e-mail about more pie-in-the-sky scenarios
involving machine learning and adaptive software, but it's hard to tell
whether they have anything to do with Office 12, or whether they're part
of the roadmap for ten years down the line.
In any case, I'm fairly skeptical about the pitch for software that will
learn my working habits and make decisions for me; machine learning has
been just over the horizon for a lot of years now, and the horizon keeps
getting stubbornly farther away.
I'm also pretty skeptical of the future scenarios the white paper paints.
One involves control and process automation in health care, with biometric
tagging for patient records, computer support for clinicians, and automated
systems chatting away at one another. I can't be the only one who shudders
at the notion of entrusting healthcare to any system built on top of an
operating system with the track record of Microsoft Windows. The other
scenario talks about a retail future in which shoppers are recognized
electronically when they cross the store's threshold, in a world where
people care even less about privacy than they do in today's age of supermarket
loyalty cards.
But I do have to be fair. Buried n the white paper is one section that
I think is extremely significant: "For those just barely catching
up with the tools and practices of information work today, the value of
some of these developments may seem elusive. But for the workers who will
be delivering the innovations and productivity growth of tomorrow, this
technology not only won't come as a surprise, it will be a positive expectation.
The 'net generation' that's coming of age today has lived its entire life
in the digital age."
As much as I've tried to stay on top of technology over the last couple
of decades, I didn't grow up with computers; I watch my own kids interact
with theirs and it's clear that their skills will surpass mine in at least
some ways by the time they're in their teens. So it's entirely possibly
that my inability to get excited by a vision of future Office applications
that boils down to "more connectivity, more collaboration, more automation"
may stem from the same root cause as my inability to appreciate any of
the atrocious noise that gets promoted as "music" these days:
I'm getting old.
In which case, the interesting questions are, how much corporate purchasing
power does the Net Generation have? And will any other company be smart
enough to be there waiting when they have control of the purchase orders?
I don't know the answers, but no matter how crazy the Office 12 marketing
strategy looks to me right now, it may turn out to be a smart long-term
investment.
What about you? Are you ready for a new world of work, or just trying
to hang on to retirement age? Is there anything that would make you buy
a new version of Office? Comments and suggestions are welcome welcome
at MikeG1@larkfarm.com.
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.