Yesterday, Dan Farber from CNET published a great podcast with Antoine LeBlond, Corporate Vice President of Office Productivity Applications. This podcast gives a fascinating perspective on what Microsoft has to say about the concept for Office 2.0.

If you believe Antoine, and I have no reason not to, Microsoft is pretty dismissive about the whole thing. According to him, an Office 2.0 word processor cannot support complex typographic features offered by its client-side counterpart, an Office 2.0 spreadsheet does not work for large datasets, and there is no demand for either anyway. Apparently, users of Microsoft Office Live love it, mainly because it gives them access to nice collections of cliparts. They do not seem to need anything more than that, or at least they’re not asking for it. Fascinating!

Quite frankly, I am not sure what to make of this. If all Microsft Word has to offer is advanced typographic features, it will be quite easy for most users to switch over to Office 2.0 alternatives. Kerning is nice, but I doubt that very many Microsoft Word users know what it is, or can even spell it. Don’t get me wrong, I love typography. I won’t read a website if it is not using a good-looking font, and I can spend ridiculous amounts of time trying to get my posts look as good as they can. But for most users, this level of sophistication is not required. In fact, in many cases Word’s too many features lead novice users to produce documents that are typographically incorrect, or just plain ugly. All Office 2.0 word processors I know currently support both Serif and Sans-serif fonts, and I doubt that more than 5% of Word’s users can explain what this means… This is not to say that they cannot be improved, but they do not need Word’s sophistication to meet the needs of most users.

The question regarding the use of large datasets with Office 2.0 applications is an interesting one too. Antoine pointed out that Office 2.0 spreadsheets could not display spreadsheets with 65,536 rows, as Excel can. Well, that is true today, but I must voice two objections: first, how many owners of a Microsoft Excel license ever developed a spreadsheet with more than 1,000 rows? I highly doubt that more than 5% did. Second, how about spreadsheets that would have 600,000 rows? Or 6 million? Or 60 million? For the truly advanced users that are using spreadsheets to analyze very large datasets coming from datawarehousing systems, Excel cannot handle the load either, and data has to be pre-processed on the server side anyway. In that respect, the browser-server architecture of Office 2.0 spreadsheets and the ability to move code from the browser to the server as described in this previous article have far more potential than Excel’s traditional client-server architecture.

Finally, the argument saying that no one is asking for Office 2.0 solutions to me sounds a lot like Thomas Watson’s prediction that “there is a world market for maybe five computers” circa 1943, or Bill Gates’ prediction that “640K should be enough for anybody” circa 1981. If you ask people whether they’d like to use computers without having to worry about viruses or hard drive crashes, I bet you my next paycheck that the answer will be a resounding yes. At this game, the question you’re asking pretty much dictates the answer you’re gonna get.

Truth be told, Antoine must be smarter than this, and I take it that his answers have more to do with marketing posturing than what he or other Microsoft folks really think about this Office 2.0 thing. In the meantime, I am infinitely grateful to Dan Farber for having published his podcast, for it will give Office 2.0 promoters some of the best arguments they need to succeed.