Gary Barnett's Blog

If you’re pressed for time:

• Open office applications are doomed unless they radically change their goals
• When people say “but it’s almost there…” you have to ask whether “there” is where they ought to be headed
• We’re in a transition phase during which Microsoft Office is vulnerable
• … But, but! Assuming that Microsoft is stupid, is stupid, stupid, stupid.
• A hint – don’t think of your laptop hard-drive as storage any more, think of it as cache
• Office applications need to embrace the online/offline worlds simultaneously and seamlessly
• Office applications need to function in the context of the business processes they support
• The document format war will not be won on Twitter – it will be won on adoption and use
• What should Open Office application providers focus on?

Open office applications are doomed unless they radically change their goals

I say “open office applications” I mean the small set of office application suites that compete directly with Microsoft Office. The two most notable of these are OpenOffice and IBM’s Lotus Symphony.

These application suites have, so far, taken on Microsoft Office by trying to offer a feature compatible “alternative”. I put alternative in quotes because it usually means different rather than clone and in practice OpenOffice and Symphony are perhaps better described as clones than alternatives. True, they are different in some respects (most notably in terms of price) but essentially they are trying to achieve the same thing.  And this is where they’re going terribly wrong.

When people say “but it’s almost there…” you have to ask whether “there” is where they ought to be headed

As a Microsoft Office clone, OpenOffice is, indeed, “almost there” but “there” is not a destination they should be heading for. “There” is a clumsy barely-connected reality where hundreds of megabytes of bloaty resource hungry fat-client software is regarded as the only way to deliver office productivity. This was always rubbish but it’s particularly rubbish now.

No-one will ever create a better “Microsoft Office” than Microsoft. Me-too products always look lame. Look at the attempts by the likes of RIM to emulate the iPhone; the BB Storm is pathetic.

The world has changed dramatically since the birth of the office productivity suite. Most of our “typing” now happens outside of word processing packages (email, notes in CRM apps, blogs, Twitter). Surely this ought to have some impact on how we think about word processing?

The open office movement has to move on – stop being obsessed with what Microsoft office is and focus on what it ought to be

We’re in a transition phase during which Microsoft Office is vulnerable

We’re in the process of the most profound shift (or re-shift if you’re an old timer) that computing has seen since the birth of client/server and distributed computing. The network really is becoming the computer.

If you want to displace Microsoft Office – now is the time to do it. The cost of Microsoft Office is raising CFO eyebrows like never before, the latest generation of the software is showing severe signs of feature fatigue, and we’re in the midst of a overwhelming shift in terms of our relationship with the kinds of document we create, the way we store those documents and the applications we’ll be using to manage and share those documents.

Now is the time – and if you’re up for it, you’ve got about 12 months to make a difference…

… But, but! Assuming that Microsoft is stupid, is stupid, stupid, stupid

I dread saying anything about Microsoft, because there’s a small but irritating (stupid and irritating as it happens) population out there who default to a sad and predictable “Microsoft sucks” diatribe whenever the company is mentioned.

Microsoft is many, many things (scores of them good things, some of them not-so-good)  but “stupid” isn’t on the list. Microsoft is one of the smartest, most self-confident enterprises on the planet. It is the most successful software company on the planet – by any financial measure you care to pick.

It would be nice if Microsoft could be persuaded to cancel all of its R&D for a year or two, but that isn’t going to happen.

Microsoft’s response to this sea-change in the way we use office productivity software is going to be strong. I’ve no doubt there’ll be mistakes on the way; false-starts are a common feature of major initiatives, but if you doubt for a second Microsoft’s ability to respond to competitive threats then get used to saying “can I take your order please”.

A hint – don’t think of your laptop hard-drive as storage any more, think of it as cache

We now have levels of bandwidth that were unthinkable before – indeed inside all the complete nonsense that people say about Web-two-dot-oh lies the single thing that differentiates the old internet from the new – bandwidth. The distinction between Web one-dot-oh and two-dot-oh is essentially nothing more than the distinction between what make sense and what doesn’t when you’ve got narrow-band internet or broad-band internet.

In 1997 I would not have dreamt of using an internet-connected server to store documents, photos or video. Non gen-Y-ers (I exclude you people because you don’t know you’re born) will remember patiently waiting for a 50k file to crawl its way slowly down the wire to chirp and buzz and boing its way into your modem and then via COM1 onto your machine. Now I’m sending tens of megabytes of video from my iPhone to YouTube without batting an eyelid.

Today I don’t store things on my PC or laptop – they’re stored online, any documents I store locally (for offline access) are essentially just cached copies.

Office applications need to embrace the online/offline worlds simultaneously and seamlessly

I think the notion of local cache not local storage is one of the key “secrets” to office application success. What if, say, OpenOffice integrated with the Google documents store, providing a local folder for cache purposes, but neatly ensuring that whenever you’re online those doc’s synchronised with your document store? Suddenly your relationship to the application and the documents you create with it has been changed, your ability to share it, broadcast it, collaborate on it – all profoundly different.

I want to be able to edit my documents wherever I am. I don’t necessarily need all of the features when I’m sitting at an internet café – display and simple editing would probably be enough. When I’m at my laptop, then we can do groovy things with wizards and templates.

So you can imagine two complimentary clients, one for web-editing and the other for rich editing, both sharing a common look and feel, both integrated and capable of editing the same documents.

Oh, and this notion of local-cache / cloud-based store is already central to much of what Microsoft is doing with it’s collaboration and office productivity tools (in case you hadn’t noticed)

Office applications need to function in the context of the business processes they support

Most of the typing we do these days isn’t into a “word processor”. We spend more time typing into our email client, CRM application, ERP, and on our blog client. Surely in this world of components and mashable applications we could use a single editor for all of these? (Just as Microsoft more or less does with its software).

To a small extent this is already happening on the web – TinyMCE or (the unfortunately named) FCKedit are two super popular JavaScript text editors that are used in an array of web-apps. All we need to do is extend the thinking… Imagine a text-editor component that you could use in Web-apps, Adobe Air Apps and even those quaint olde-world “Native GUI” apps (or if you want to be really retro – Java Swing) ?

Users learn how to use one text editing widget – rather than remembering the formatting and mark-up quirks of many. How cool would that be?

The document format war will not be won on Twitter – it will be won on adoption and use

I happen to think that Microsoft’s OOXML shouldn’t be called an “open standard”. It’s not about “open” it’s about “closed” it’s not about the “future” it’s about the past.
The development of OOXML must have been like driving a car using only the rear-view mirror to tell where you’re going. It’s a nasty kluge designed to serve the dual purposes of reinforcing Microsoft’s virtual monopoly and providing some backward (backward in every sense of the word) compatibility. I also object to the shenanigans associated with the OSI process – but I do feel obliged to note that the activity of filling committee rooms with your supporters wasn’t invented by Microsoft – many other vendors have “stuffed” meetings in the past in order to sway votes, and many more will in the future.
I think ODF is better. As a format ODF is technically better conceived, and while there are still some areas where further development is required it is a rich, flexible and thoroughly usable technology. The fundamental “OOXML beater” is its genuine openness and extensibility.

ODF is about the future, OOXML is about the past – But it doesn’t matter a flying crap what I think.
It doesn’t matter what the different interested parties blog or tweet – the decision will be made by feet on the street.

Microsoft has an enormous head-start in the feet on the street battle, but again – remember where we’re doing the bulk of our typing these days; there is a real opportunity for ODF to become the de-facto standard for word-processing documents on the internet. The bad news is that it’s easier for a PHP developer to find and use OOXML libraries than ODF – How did that happen? ODF can win the adoption battle but it’s going to take developers to build up free and easy to use ODF libraries for PHP developers, Javascript text editors and so on.

If it is easier for developers to embed ODF functionality into their sites than OOXML then they will – it really is as simple as that.

What should Open Office application providers focus on?

Drawing on what I’ve said so far there are some obvious items on the list;

• Focus on the features Microsoft Office doesn’t have and worry less about the features it does
• Deliver integration, code libraries, tutorials and how-to documents to make it easy for third parties to embed your solution
• Focus on making your text editor embeddable within web pages, CRM apps, ERP, and so on
• Focus on the idea of local disk as cache, network as storage
• Think about other processes within which you might add value
• Think about the needs of systems administrators
• Think about migration (not just documents but templates, standard colours, etc.)

I’ve written a slightly longer paper on this topic – if you’d like to chat or know more, ping me at gary@bathwick.com

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