Information technology has lived through hardware wars, software wars, operating system wars, browser wars and is now preparing for a new one. The spoils in this battle are your documents. As an increasing number of users are turning to the web for Microsoft Office-type capabilities, but without the Microsoft Office price tag, a battle is being waged to provide these services — and more.
Online storage, online editing, collaborative authoring, the ability to go offline and still work — these are fresh and fertile features that are becoming indispensable in the new global office. The collaboration war is beginning. Chief protagonists are the usual suspects: Microsoft (who else?), Google (who else?), the open-source community, as well as an increasing number of other companies such as Buzzword (Adobe), Wet paint, Wikia, OpenGoo, Thinkfree, Zoho, eXpresso and Zimbra (Yahoo). Expect more companies to start flexing their muscles soon.
If the global office is changing, so too are the global office workers. Those languid nine-to-five days of one man, one word processor, one tea and two ginger biscuits are long gone. In communication terms the world has shrunk to the size of a pinhead, where data transmission is instantaneous and co-workers can collaborate wherever, whenever. It’s not just Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis who can, while standing on the beach, conjure up a vital document using only a cellphone and a Pina Colada. It’s you — Eric from the accounts department. And, in the event of being away from an internet connection, that problem too is being solved with applications such as Google Gears and the possibilities it creates.
If so many major companies are spending so much time and money to provide a web-based, online storage and office suite, what is Microsoft — the king of office suites — doing? By the looks of it, expecting slavish devotion from their plump cash cow — the hundreds of millions of MS Office users — who surely must have a sadomasochistic streak. There are two reasons why Microsoft is the biggest and most successful software company. One is that they market very good application software; their Office products in particular are feature-rich and excellent. The other is that users of those products become locked into, and trapped by, Microsoft’s sacred space. Although other applications such as Google Docs and Buzzword are indifferent to client software, Microsoft’s online collaboration product — Live Workspace — requires that MS Office exists on the client machine. What a surprise. Yet another attempt at proprietary software lock-in and, once more, Microsoft strides boldly into last week. With his blunt wit, Eric Raymond beautifully paraphrased the folly of its approach in his seminal article The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
So what’s in Google’s arsenal? Well, free software for a start. That’s free as in “you do not have to pay for it”, as opposed to Live Workspace where free means “you do not have to pay for it, BUT you must have a pre-purchased, pre-installed copy of MS Office and any add-ons you ‘may’ have to pay for”. Google needs a strong product because, before it even begins to market it, it is fighting a growing anti-Google sentiment. The prevailing perception is that Google is becoming the new Microsoft; it’s too big, too powerful, too rich and too influential; that it has eaten the Internet.
Fortunately for it, Google has several very good products. Free. While Google Docs — its online office application — does not have some of the advanced features of MS Office, Google will point out quite correctly that many of those missing features are not needed, that they’re just bells and whistles. In terms of getting useful work done Google Docs has more than enough features.
The added advantage is that Google Docs lives inside the Google hive, alongside other major applications such as Google Calendar, Google Reader, GMail and, of course, the de facto search engine. Because office documents reside on the internet, it becomes possible to have spreadsheet cells that update themselves to reflect live information. This type of ability has meaningful implications for many applications, an example of which is a financial spreadsheet that populates itself from live exchange rates. Google’s search engine can be invoked from, and piped to, your document. For revisioning purposes Google Docs offers the option to keep track of changes that have been made over the course of a document’s, or spreadsheet’s, lifespan. Back-ups — any documents or spreadsheets created on the service are constantly being backed up in several places at once. If all this is not worrying enough for competitors, Google has another ace up its sleeve — Google Gears.
Google Gears is a way of running online applications offline. Google considers it still very much work-in-progress, but already it holds intriguing possibilities. First, a web application needs to be written in such a way that it can be Gears enabled. Second, and to put it extremely simply, a local server and a light database need to be installed on the client’s (which in most people’s case is their laptop computer). To use Gears, it is then a case of indicating that you are going offline to work, responding to a few popups, allowing the local server to synchronise itself and then disconnecting. Synchronisation takes place again when you reconnect. You can literally work anywhere, anytime or until your battery runs out.
An interesting aspect to web-based office applications is that they allow collaborative authoring. In case you think that collaborative authoring is a fad, keep in mind the fact that Wikipedia has evolved as a collaborative project and the entire open-source movement is a form of it. A document stored on the internet allows it to be accessed and edited by many people, who would otherwise have to update, then save, then email. For each additional author in the collaboration, rinse and repeat. In these circumstances versioning can quickly become a nightmare, the authoring process is too time-consuming and a disaster is looking for a home.
Online editing and collaboration is a much more elegant solution and Virtual Ubiquity’s product — BuzzWord — is an example of how easy collaboration can be when using a good product. Adobe recently bought Virtual Ubiquity for “an undisclosed amount” and, with Adobe’s excellent reputation and marketing clout, is well positioned to become a major force.
Whichever company eventually prevails, however much it slices and dices its product to make it appealing, they all have to overcome a major misgiving — security.
Companies can reassure users as much they like, the misgivings still remain. Despite firewalls, secure servers, passwords and encryption, the perception remains that the internet is useful, but not safe. Distrust runs deep. The company that deals best with this issue and still manages to provide acceptable office features will prevail.
How will Microsoft respond to other companies nibbling away at its previously undisputed territory? As things stand now, the tried and tested MS Office suite has better features, but for how long? The competition is continually improving its features and, in some web-base aspects, is already better. Will Microsoft’s proprietary tendencies come back to haunt it? Will those features, those wizards, that helpful little paper clip, save it? Time will tell.
Perhaps the best conclusion to come to is that there is life after Microsoft. Yes, its products are good — so use them. The growing range of free or cheaper alternatives are also good — so use them too. It’s that pesky eggs-and-baskets thing that needs to be managed. Use Microsoft for all the feature-rich, client-heavy work; use the Google hive for the general and web-based stuff; use Mac/OSX/Linux for your hardware/operating system and don’t worry that the CIA is looking at your documents. You’re probably right and there is not much you can do about it.