Daily Archive: June 3, 2005
I posted a while ago about my quest to go paper-less, its going very well btw although I find it’s becoming a bit of an obsession :-(. Anyway I recently came across this interesting article and trend graph.
I also got an email from Milton, who had read my post on going paper-less. Milton has a blog where he talks about paper-less office ideas and articles and even better he has written and eBook on the subject that he sells on his site. He has been kind enough to send me a copy to read, so I will report back on that soon.
This is big news and widely reported, and live on video. I am increasingly impressed around the evolution of Office, I think Microsoft is finally realising that people don’t want more incremental functions to refine what they already do. They want new way of working to be enabled. The new features in 12 seem to be going in that direction at least in the collaboration and information management areas, I can’t wait to see what they do when they can build on top of Longhorn and WinFS. That’s not to say that OOo is not doing some great creative stuff as well, and of course the killer value proposition of OOo will be its ubiquity as within 3 years I doubt there will be a corporate desktop anywhere that does not have access to OOo, I don’t think we will be able to say that about office 12, so Microsoft needs to get creative, Metro is the first glimmer of that, we will have to wait and see!
One of the best places to keep informed seems to be Brian Jone’s blog, a bit about Brian:
Brian is a program manager on the Word team. He’s been at Microsoft for …
Microsoft and Sun put on a nice show recently to demonstrate that competitors can still work together to improve interoperability for the benefit of their customers, this follows a couple of years of real progress by Microsoft in working out (with partners and competitors again) an architectural approach (web services) that allows them to innovate but inter-operate. Of course the Open Source world has been showing the way on that for years, so its nothing new, but it’s certainly an encouraging move by Microsoft. This last report on their approaches to Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik and more recently Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat is further evidence. Certainly in my discussions with Microsoft I am detecting an increasing awareness of the real world that customers live in, rather than the ideal world (in their eyes) that Microsoft would like us to be in, progress, slow but sure.
