Cat5bird Seat

New World of Hype

The Office 12 pitch may sound like familiar drivel, but its target may not be you, after all.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 09/01/2005

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 [email protected].